Biometrics: Creating Efficiency & Preventing Fraud Online

Businesses rely increasingly on their e-commerce sites. The coronavirus crisis accelerated this trend, which means many sales will likely stay online. But issues still confront e-commerce businesses and other companies that sell online. It’s a need that businesses must address in order to earn and keep shoppers’ trust.

You need passwords to access online accounts, whether it’s for social media, banking, or online check outs. All these sites we use regularly require authentication, usually in the form of passwords. If you’re anything like me or most Internet users, forgetting passwords for a site you haven’t used in a while is a headache you’d rather avoid. That’s where biometrics comes in.

Biometrics & E-Commerce Issues

According to Oxford, biometrics is “the application of statistical analysis to biological data,” and it can deal with many of these concerns. Let’s first look at a few problems businesses and consumers face when transacting online, which include:

•         Abandoned shopping carts – Visual Website Optimizer estimates 68% of online shoppers leave checkout without completing purchases, with 56% backing out due to unexpected checkout costs or tech-related reasons.
•         Online fraud – hackers can easily gain access to people’s accounts through malware and spyware, capturing customers’ personal and payment information.
•         Parochialism – only 19% of US retailers translate their sites into other languages, and under half quote prices in users’ home currencies.

Biometrics can help with all of these problems, but particularly when it comes to fraud prevention and identity theft. It’s relatively easy for a hacker to gain access to someone’s password, but much more complex to trick biometrically protected access. Fingerprints, for example, are more reliable at verifying identities than passwords or asking specific questions about your favorite food, where you went to school, or your first pet’s name.

It’s important too that businesses protect their – and their customers’ – financial data from illicit access. Because biometrics are individual-specific, they are invariably more difficult to bypass. And it’s very important if you want to grow your company. Businesses that fail to protect against fraud will find their sales start to plummet. According to a report by marketing company Daymon Interactions, 40% of shoppers avoid retailers hit by data breaches and almost 50% believe retailers should invest in technology to prevent breaches.

Efficient Purchasing

Nearly all e-commerce sites require passwords, and many online users utilize the same or similar passwords to identify themselves on multiple sites. Besides making it easy for hackers to gain access, forgotten passwords create a major roadblock for e-commerce sites. Customers – myself included – become frustrated and abandon the buying process if it becomes too difficult.

Creating too many hoops through which a consumer must jump inevitably leads to lost sales. Biometric recognition systems are more convenient, easier to use, and more secure. Password-based access is antiquated and that ‘username or password is incorrect’ message frustrates those who regularly access multiple devices and online accounts.

Last summer, Apple started testing a feature that allows users to sign into their iCloud accounts with fingerprint or facial identification on compatible Apple devices, in order to eliminate the need for passwords. Some competitors also introduced facial recognition systems, though with the COVID-19 outbreak and the increased wearing of protective masks in public many, including Apple, are returning to fingerprint recognition.

Amazon and other big online retailers are also experimenting with biometrics, though Amazon is only enacting hand-recognition based payments at its brick-and-mortar locations – Whole Foods and Amazon Go. It’s only a matter of time, however, before customers can just sign off with fingerprints, handprints, voice recognition, eye scans, or other biometric measures on handheld portable biometrics readers when they receive deliveries.

Label-making companies are already on board and incorporating biometric technology into their labeling systems, supporting companies like UPS and FedEx in tracking packages. Cooperation between companies like Enko, couriers, and e-commerce businesses could create new sales opportunities, providing customers solutions to problems they didn’t know they had.

Fighting Fraud

One of the most important reasons companies turn to biometrics is to fight fraud. Online environments allow hackers easy access to consumer data, which scammers use for distributed denial of service attacks, phishing scams, bad bots, and other scams. These days, most people understand the need to protect their identities and, as a form of security, new biometric tech adds an extra layer to protect against identity theft and other forms of fraud. It’s relatively easy to steal credit card or banking details, but much more difficult to mimic a person’s voice or use their fingerprints.

This goes along with what Wavestone – an IT consulting company that deals with fraud protection – anticipates will occur with how companies prevent, detect, and respond to fraud. Companies like Wavestone are at the forefront of dealing with anti-fraud efforts and already anticipating these new trends, including the use of biometrics to protect against fraud. Such companies constantly identify strategies to keep up with security challenges and new fraud detection techniques.

For more than a decade, biometrics have provided security and access control, including for computer systems and networks, and they will only become more common as biometric technology advances. While people will invariably continue to use passwords, they will become less important and easier to bypass, as they have proved unreliable as a security measure. Biometrics truly boast an advantage over other types of security, in that they:

• ·         identify individuals
• ·         control information access
• ·         maintain data consistency, accuracy, and trustworthiness
• ·         assure against denial of validity

It’s an advantage too that biometrics are a constant part of each individual and directly correspond to a person’s identity. It not only provides extremely strong access control, but it’s currently the gold standard for anti-fraud security solutions. Fingerprint-based biometric security can significantly increase data security on electronic devices, including a company’s desktop computers, and as costs for such measures decline, e-commerce sites will increasingly use them.

Identifying Preferences

For businesses, identifying users and personalizing suggestions can help coax a customer into ordering. E-commerce businesses are recognizing the significant function that biometric technology can play, though it has yet to gain widespread use. With intimate knowledge about each other, the interaction between customer and vendor can help smooth transactions and help develop trust that allows a relationship to develop.

We already have Facebook, Google, Apple, and other big tech companies involved in AI anticipating our wants and needs. Someday soon, a quick cornea scan could identify you as a LARP afficionado who lives in London and who has a penchant for Thai curries. A new version of Siri or Alexa could suggest a restaurant or holiday based on our preference. It might even automatically translate the site you’re visiting into Russian, your preferred language, and calculate costs in pounds sterling.

Biometrics & Consumers

So, if biometric ID is the answer to smooth e-commerce, why hasn’t it yet caught on? Perhaps it’s because, although the checkout process is annoying, it’s still less inconvenient than having to go out into the world to buy things. Businesses already accept the technology, so it’s just a matter of time before consumers do too.