Visa Joins FIDO Alliance Board of Directors

The Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance has just announced that Visa Inc., the global payments technology company, has joined its board of directors. This is a big get for the Alliance, who just over a year old has amassed over 120 members including MasterCard, Discover and PayPal.

Visa Europe will be joining the Alliance as a sponsor member, represented on the board by Visa Inc.

“Strong authentication is vitally important as the future of payments becomes increasingly mobile and digital,” said Mark Nelsen, head of risk products and business intelligence at Visa. “As payment technologies continue to advance, an open, scalable and interoperable framework will support a move away from simple, static password-based authentication and towards more advanced methods that will improve security as well as enable more frictionless, convenient commerce.”

As a member of FIDO, Visa will be committed to the sharing of technology and interorganizational collaboration in the continuing development of universal specifications for strong online authentication.

“With the addition of Visa to the FIDO Alliance board, our leadership includes the world’s leading payments networks and services providers,” explains FIDO president Michael Barrett. “Though FIDO specifications are not currently designed to address all aspects of secure payments, it’s clear that payments technologies and services are fundamental to the development of better authentication that is capable of overcoming the risks and limitations associated with password dependencies that date back a half century.”

Now with this impressive list of payment technology providers, FIDO is making a strong case for its specifications in the realm of mCommerce. Already, Alliance members PayPal and Nok Nok Labs have collaborated with Samsung to make secure biometric payments possible with the new Samsung Galaxy S5. To learn more about the applications of mobile ID in this vast area of application, be sure to read the primer published as part of mCommerce Month here at Mobile ID Wolrd.