techUK Report: Biometrics in Digital Identity

An excerpt from a techUK report on Biometrics in Digital Identity

The higher level of assurance inherent within properly implemented biometrics services can also play a significant part in developing trust in digital services by protecting both consumers and businesses reducing fraud and financial crime. For businesses, biometrics allows them to streamline and simplify their internal operational processes, lower costs and concentrate resources on growing revenue.

Being able to quickly, conveniently and securely access government, banking and other online services, significantly reduce queues and traffic congestion in the travel and transport sectors and work from your home or other remote locations without the constant need to remember and manually input a myriad of different user names and passwords, these in turn being augmented by an additional security layer of multi-factor authentication in the form of SMS or email-generated security codes, authentication apps or similar is the nut that the digital industry has been trying to crack for a number of years now.

Remembering unique login details which might be used only once a year can prove problematic for citizens wanting to submit their annual tax return, the physical checking of paper documentation at airport check-ins and ‘binding’ of a ticket to an individual takes time, is susceptible to human error and can lead to the type of airport terminal congestion and at passport control that we have all experienced. The disruption caused at Dover and other ports in recent years are another stark reminder of our continuing reliance on outmoded processes that depend on the production of correctly presented paper-based documentation and the negative impact it can inflict on the UK economy. It is against this background that the advantages of implementing secure, high level of assurance biometric service platforms across both government and industry start to become clear.

Put simply, the use of biometric data, properly implemented can transform your customers onboarding and login experiences by removing almost all manual inputting of knowledge-based attributes such as user-names, passwords and security codes and doing so in a way that is significantly more secure – inherent in properly implemented biometric service platforms it is, by an order of magnitude, significantly more difficult for even the most organised and creative fraudsters to replicate (more on this in the report) - than any of these existing methods.

 

You can read the full article published by techUK here.