Security provider InAuth just announced a partnership with Zelle—the old clearXchange, for those who are still not used to the rebrand —in order to provide better mobile security on the Zelle app when it’s launched sometime in the first six months of 2017.
“Knowing what the [mobile] network operators know is key to this kind of security,” Eric Woodward, group president of risk solutions for Early Warning — Zelle’s parent company — says of the partnership. “When building [the Zelle app], we needed really strong, bank-level security.”
Mobile and security are two words that are consistently at the forefront of fintech; the amount of love (or dependence on the source) consumers have for their phones barely needs to be mentioned at this point, and security concerns are just never going to go away, ever, because fraudsters love technology too.
It obviously follows that the combination of the two has become both a top concern of businesses as well as a competitive market; InAuth approaches the issue by making the actual device a factor of authentication.
“What InAuth brings is that they’re a mobile-first authenticator,” says Woodward. “To have that [device] history is very powerful.”
InAuth and Early Warning join a number of companies who are attempting to utilize the behavior of the device as an identifying factor for users although of course approaches differ; IBM for example just added what it’s terming “cognitive behavioral biometrics” to its fraud prevention platform: IBM Security Trusteer PinPoint Detect.
“[Behavioral biometrics] are a unique way for financial institutions to know you from what you do,” says Brooke Satti Charles, financial crime prevention strategist at IBM Trusteer, on the added capabilities, which should roll out around December of this year. “Our goal is to help financial institutions detect and prevent a full range of attacks.”
Behavioral biometrics leverage device characteristics such as geolocation; gestures; IP addresses; “cognitive” is IBM’s way of saying it’s machine learning without actually saying it’s machine learning, because that leads to questions about AI and Watson.
However, whether one approaches device security IBM’s way or InAuth’s way, it’s clear things like device history and biometrics are becoming important tools for online security—and the better the solutions work, the happier consumers are, because then consumers don’t have to think about authentication at all.
“Our goal is to make authentication as passive and transparent as possible,” says Woodward, of the benefits InAuth’s security will have for users of the much-anticipated Zelle app. “We want to create the best consumer experience possible.”