Fraud & Identity Featured Article

Mastercard Exec Discusses Identity Advancements

By Paula Bernier Executive Editor, TMC

The growing sophistication of the hacker and fraudster community, and the wide array of connected data and things, has made a clear case for businesses – particularly those in the financial services space – to figure out how to better secure things. And that is happening, with more advanced methods of authentication as part of the work.

That includes biometrics and a whole lot more – including behavioral analytics, biometric analytics, device identification, and geolocation.

But, although companies like Apple (News - Alert) are inducing facial recognition and others like Samsung are coming out with iris scanners, it’s not always clear to banks and other financial institutions about how they can leverage these solutions. And the wide variety of authentication methods, user endpoints, and operating systems make for a fragmented ecosystem that creates more challenging for businesses, financial institutions, and companies like Mastercard that serve them.

That was a key takeaway from a recent Biometric Update interview with Mastercard Executive Vice President of Identity Solutions Product Bob Reany.

Reany said Mastercard also has been pilot testing smart cards with on-board fingerprint sensors. “From an engineering standpoint, getting a fingerprint reader on a card that doesn’t have a battery, that has a limited processor, that has limited storage, has been a very interesting challenge that we’ve been working on over the last few years,” he told Biometric Update. “But the good news is: We have them!”

That technology could be available in developing countries without existing payments systems as early as this year, he says.

“I think you’ll see most of the innovation completed in the first half of 2018, and it will be a matter of starting to roll things out later in the year,” he tells the media outlet. “It’s all about scale and integration, and making that innovation pipeline pay off. That’s what this coming year is about.”