The Challenge
The security and usability challenges associated with customer authentication are well-known, especially to banks, which tend to enforce long, complex and frequently changing alphanumeric passwords; or, they may use One Time Passwords or combinations of techniques that represent user friction and unnecessary failure rates. This can cause confusion for customers and unnecessary cost: some enterprises in Japan have reported that up to 40% of calls to their contact centers are from customers wanting to recover or reset a username or password. In the Japanese market, there was growing interest among banks and other service providers in transitioning to the newer, more secure and convenient practice of biometric authentication. However, there remained intractable problems preventing adoption. If every bank and service provider created its own biometric algorithms and authentication platforms, it would result in unnecessary costs and complexity for the companies and compound the friction for end users