Biometrics is most popular for onboarding in only one country — survey

Buried in a new marketing-driven survey about the importance of consumers’ retail digital experience, is a surprising insight into the importance of biometric security.

Of 14 nations (plus Puerto Rico) surveyed around the world, consumers in only two, Hong Kong and Brazil, prefer to verify their identity with biometrics when they open an online account according to credit-reporting firm TransUnion.

And of Hong Kong and Brazil, only the South American giant seems thoroughly convinced about biometrics for onboarding.

TransUnion, which is trying fashion itself as an identity company, found that all four Brazilian generations — generation Z, millennials, generation X and baby boomers — prefer biometrics over all other verification techniques.

Only gen Z in Hong Kong preferred biometrics. Everyone else felt safe with multifactor authentication.

The message of the report is that businesses have to optimally balance tough authentication with acceptable customer experience. TransUnion‘s goal is to prompt businesses to use its identity and anti-fraud services.

The generational spread among rest of the nations surveyed, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Kenya and South Africa, included some combination of one-time passwords, multifactor authentication, document verification and token-based authentication.

It is difficult to say right now if biometrics — face, fingerprints, voice and behavioral among other techniques — or any proven avenue for securing identity would find a very avid market.

Globally, business ID theft and ID mining and phishing rose 114 percent and 105 percent, respectively, from 2020 to 2021, according to TransUnion’s report.

True identification theft grew 26 percent globally in all market segments over the last year, according to the report, and 82 percent over the past two years.

This crime involves a stolen ID is used to commit fraud against a real person, regardless of industry.

It differs from personal identification information theft in that it is the “theft of your destiny, potential, goals, and who you were intended to be,” in TransUnion’s words.

True identity theft is the most prevalent type of digital fraud in financial services, for example.

Financial services is one of the unfortunate market segments that have seen their rate of suspected digital fraud jump between 2019 and 2021. Suspected cases increased 61 percent over that period.

Others have had it worse. Travel and leisure suffered 111 percent growth. Electronic games and gaming (not gambling) increased about 70 percent.

Online communities, however, reported a 24 percent drop in suspected fraud. And logistics saw a 17 percent drop.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  document verification  |  identity verification  |  multifactor authentication  |  onboarding  |  TransUnion  |  user experience