Visa has laid out a Future of Security Roadmap for the Australian market, and sophisticated technologies including biometrics are going to play an increasingly important role.
Covering the 2017 to 2020 period, the Roadmap is framed around the rapid growth of e-commerce, which Visa says has grown 35 percent over the last two years. At the same time, approaches to security are lagging, with only 25 percent of Australians setting unique passwords for each online account. But consumers see the potential of new technologies, with Visa citing a recent AYTM study indicating that 67 percent of Australians believe biometric authentication for payments is easier than that based on passwords.
The trends echo recent Unisys findings indicating that Europeans are also increasingly looking to biometric technologies for digital security, and seem may be the result of consumers growing familiarity with such technologies on mobile devices thanks to the ubiquity of smartphone fingerprint scanners and new solutions like the iPhone X’s Face ID authentication system. Accordingly, in its Roadmap, Visa has published a new standard, the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method (CDCVM) that covers the use of biometrics, and says it’s working with the FIDO Alliance and other groups to certify products for biometric authentication applications. The company also stresses that it “is not selecting or actively promoting a single type of biometric,” but rather is open to a range of options.
Other initiatives laid out in Visa’s Future of Security Roadmap include an effort to get partners to tokenize data, encouraging the acceptance of EMV chip security, establishing standards for software-based PIN entry, and the implementation of 3-D Secure version 2.0, EMVCo’s electronic authentication platform for merchants.
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