Digital Identity Gets Its Recognition

Digital Identity Gets Its Recognition

Say goodbye to your passwords … if you can remember them. As verifiable digital identity gradually becomes the next-gen driver’s license and passport, companies and individuals are bidding farewell to login credentials they either can’t recall or that have already been hacked.

In the March 2020 Digital Identity Tracker® done in collaboration with Jumio, new developments in biometrics and identity-as-a-service (IaaS) are making good on the no-password future we’ve been hearing about since the day after they were invented.

Certain use cases border on unnerving – like the Chinese government employing thermal-scanning tech made by Hong Kong-based SenseTime that “authenticates” individuals by remote-scanning foreheads for fevers. It’s an inconspicuous way to screen crowds for contagion without being exposed. It’s also the kind of deployment that keeps techno-ethicists up at night.

The latest Digital Identity Tracker® examines these and other intriguing advancements in pursuit of a durable, portable digital identity that reduces cybercrime dramatically.

“A Stunning Turn of Events”

One prediction says that by 2022, passwords will start becoming “past” words in a mass phaseout of the legacy security protocol. “Approximately 60 percent of large companies and 90 percent of mid-size firms are expected to begin eliminating passwords by 2022, and many are turning to two-factor authentication (2FA) or biometric solutions like fingerprint or facial recognition,” the Tracker says. “These developments mark a stunning turn of events from 2018, when just 5 percent of businesses were taking steps to eliminate passwords.”

And it’s not all down to passwords. New horizons in biometrics are making the greatest physical card security breakthroughs since the EMV chip. Together with Mastercard, NatWest has debuted a new generation of contactless debit and credit cards with built-in fingerprint scanning. The powered fingerprint-reading card is recharged every time it’s inserted at an ATM.

“One of the decisions that we made very early on in the design process was that the biometrics did not leave the card at all,” David Crawford, head of effortless payments for NatWest, told PYMNTS. “None of that information is stored with the bank, [so the] customer owns all of that information at any moment in time.”

The new biometrics are backward-compatible and will reportedly work with existing ATMs.

Identity as a Must-Have Service

Not to be outshone by the cards they issue and honor, banks are getting in on the biometrics action in their own big way. Read the March 2020 Digital Identity Tracker® to learn about biometrics rollouts from The Bank of Thailand, South Africa’s Standard Bank and the Bank of Uganda, as well as new biometrics analytics coming soon from industry titans like Apple.

As detailed in the latest Tracker, IaaS is the framework for many recent rollouts, as capabilities like certified liveness detection and authentic ID verification form the foundation of greatly enhanced identity security, with implications going far beyond finance.