In the last decade, technological innovations have made it possible to do just about everything online – From buying groceries to making payments. Unfortunately, this ease of convenience has elevated the incidence of online fraud and scams. Criminals use several techniques to access your accounts to either siphon off funds or steal your identity. Security breaches and unauthorised access mean that it’s more important than ever to secure your account. It is therefore essential to consider state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures that provide persistent, adaptive authentication while simultaneously reducing expensive administrative headaches and user friction. That’s where behavioural biometrics comes into the picture.
What is Behavioural Biometrics?
Every person is unique. The way someone speaks or the cadence they type are as unique as fingerprints. These traits are difficult to replicate or capture. Behavioural biometrics uses these unique traits to authenticate users and protect their data.
Behavioural biometrics leverages machine learning to analyse patterns in human activity and detect whether someone is who they claim to be when interacting online and whether a human or a bot drives the activity. It assesses the identity of online users based on their behaviours, such as how they type, swipe and keystroke patterns. The data is then analysed using AI and ML technologies and algorithms. When the user attempt to log in, they are passively assigned a risk score depending on how closely the behaviour they display matches their past.
Behavioural biometrics analyses a user’s digital physical and cognitive behaviour to distinguish between fraudulent activity and legitimate customers. As soon as the system detects ‘abnormal behaviours’, responses are triggered in the background to conduct additional investigations and protect the legitimate user’s account.
Unlike traditional authentication methods, which authenticate only when access is initiated, behavioural biometrics technologies authenticate continuously, evaluating a user’s ongoing interaction in real-time.
Why Do We Need Behavioral Biometrics?
How can we distinguish between a good user and a fraudster? With newer technologies coming into play, it has become easier for fraudsters to steal or purchase personal data to access or open a fraudulent account.
Across the board, cybercriminals are becoming innovative and bolder. Digital and mobile banking have revolutionised the financial industry, giving fraudsters newer ways to attempt fraud. The rising numbers indicate that device identification and manual reviewing aren’t enough to stop cyber criminals or even slow them down. Newer, more efficient methods of tracking fraudsters by behavioural biometrics are now available.
Read more about Identity proofing
Bureau’s Behavioural Biometrics Solution:
Bureau’s ML-based intelligent decisioning and fraud detection models have been trained on billions of data points gleaned from our network of customers, data partners and proprietary data sources. It analyses each user’s behavioural profile and creates a unique user signature that reflects the distinct ways a user interacts with critical systems—gestures such as typing speed and swipe patterns, detecting copy-pasting and even pauses before typing. Once a user’s profile is learned, their gestures are monitored silently, in real-time, to authenticate identity continuously. If behavioural patterns don’t match the profile, the system can immediately prompt for other forms of authentication, block access, or lock the device down entirely.
Behavioural Biometrics identifies:
1) Typing patterns and swiping speed
2) Scrolling speed and mouse movements
3) Copy-paste detection
4) Hesitation detection
5) Sensors Monitoring
Take for instance, the process of opening an online account. Fraudulent accounts are a serious problem, costing banks time and money and additional friction that may cause customer churn. The question is: How can you trust a new customer? Here’s where our behavioural biometrics comes into play.
Typing speed, swipe patterns, and even the click of your mouse can differentiate a fraudster from a genuine user. Behavioural biometrics can quickly spot a trusted profile to create a smooth customer journey during the account opening process. The power of machine learning identifies a good behaviour from a ‘bad’ one.
Through continuous monitoring, behavioural biometrics can also prevent criminal activities such as account takeover that verifies the user’s identity throughout a session. With visibility into the entire session, fraudulent transactions can be stopped before they occur.
Why Use Bureau’s Behavioural Biometrics Capabilities?
Improves user experience: Fast, frictionless and convenient authentication process.
Non-invasive: The process of data collection and authentication takes place in the background without users’ inputs.
Continuous Authentication: confirms identities during every interaction, instead of just on the initial sign-in.
Additional security: Behavioral biometrics cannot be imitated by a bad actor. Even if they log in with the second factor of authentication, without the right behaviours, the account would still be inaccessible.
Fast and low-cost deployment: No need to invest in engineering bandwidth.
Know more about Automating Decisions for Faster Fraud Detection
Summing Up
As fraud keeps evolving towards more sophisticated attacks, it is crucial to consider an ecosystem of technologies and stop working in silos. Behavioural biometrics represents a powerful tool that when integrated with other detection capabilities, can help to look at online customers more comprehensively to understand their behaviours and patterns. To find out more about Bureau’s biometric authentication solution reach out to us.
