Behavioural Biometrics

With the growing incidence of cyber-crimes and frauds, banks and financial institutions are constantly trying to leverage the latest technology to ensure better risk management while providing their customers a more convenient and more personalized experience. One such latest technology that is being increasingly considered by banks and financial institutions is behavioural biometrics. But what exactly is behavioural biometrics? Let’s find out…

While physical biometrics measures biological characteristics like fingerprints and iris patterns, behavioural biometrics identifies and measures some unique behaviour of people when they interact with a device. For example, gait, voice, signature, mouse use characteristics, and keystroke patterns, etc.

As a breakthrough cyber security technology, behavioural biometrics can make the entire process of authentication more secure and frictionless. It does that by capturing and analysing patterns in a range of human activities or their interactions with a device and an application. Based on such unique patterns, a unique profile is created for each customer.

Behavioural biometrics can eventually do away with the user name/password authentication method, which is vulnerable to security breaches. By leveraging big data and machine learning technologies, behavioural biometrics can help identify such unique personal and device characteristics which can help differentiate between fraudsters and legitimate customers. Unusual patterns can be picked up easily to prevent potentially fraudulent activities and that is too without the requirement of any human involvement. This, in turn, can help financial institutions to lower their operational and administrative costs.   

Behavioural biometrics can ensure better risk management by establishing multiple layers of assessment such as at the level of device, location, and finally, user behaviour. Customers, on the other hand, can have a seamless and more secure and personalized experience.

However, the success and acceptance of behavioural biometrics depend to a great extent on the security of data.  Biometric data is extremely sensitive private data and cannot be changed when compromised, unlike a password or PIN number. Any breach of biometric data can have devastating effect on consumers’ trust on the technology. So, a robust security structure should be in place to increase the adoption and application of behavioural biometrics in authentication processes.