Keyless looks at promising 2025 after major growth, new hires in 2024

A release from Keyless says the London-based biometrics and passwordless authentication firm had a “milestone year” in 2024, expanding its global presence and achieving record growth forecasted to reach a whopping 780 percent by year’s end.

To date, the firm has reached 657 percent growth. Heading into 2025, it has enlisted the help of some industry heavy hitters to keep the momentum going. In the U.S., Sarah Clark, former SVP of digital identity at Mastercard and general manager at Mitek, joins the Keyless team as an advisor. As does Charles Walton, “a leading figure in decentralized identity with senior roles at Mastercard and Avast.”

The biometrics firm named Ali Nazem as head of sales for North America and Stephan Koester as director of technical services for the Americas.

In Europe, Alessandro Profumo, former CEO of Leonardo and UniCredit, and Francesco Caio, ex-CEO of Cable & Wireless and Poste Italiane, join the fold.

Market traction for biometrics exceeds expectations

This year’s boom is thanks in no small part to Keyless’ partnership with a top 10 European bank, which it says saved the client $4 million in help desk savings and cut account takeover fraud by 77 percent, by replacing call centers with self-service face biometrics.

Keyless CEO Andrea Carmignani calls 2024 has been “a transformational year for privacy-preserving biometrics. We have seen market traction and technological development beyond even our own expectations.” Zero-Knowledge biometrics technology has helped drive secure payments and account recovery processes with no retention of biometric data.

The firm contributed its own innovation in the form of the Keyless IDV Bridge, which removes the need for separate enrollments into identity verification (IDV) and authentication by connecting the two domains.

“Existing users are silently enrolled into Keyless in bulk, and new users are added during a bank’s Know Your Customer (KYC) process, dramatically simplifying integration with authentication providers.”

Keyless spun out from Sift at the end of 2023. Now, it is marking the end of 2024 by becoming available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, allowing Azure cloud users to access its multi-factor facial biometric authentication.

And it promises partnerships with “several more” banks in early 2025. Which means it may not be done ballooning yet.

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  identity verification  |  Keyless