Stefan K. Persson is Chief Executive Officer at Precise Biometrics, a market-leading supplier of solutions for convenient and secure authentication of people’s identity. In his past career, Stefan was Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President for Bang & Olufsen, and Chief Operating Officer of Medicom Innovation. 

Biometrics has in just a few years become one of the most popular and frequently used features in our smarthpones. What have been the main driver of this success?

Biometrics have been used for border control and law enforcement for decades, but it wasn’t until five years ago, with the launch of Touch-ID, that biometrics were put to use for personal identification in our smartphones. Today, most mobile devices come with at least one type of biometrics and are increasingly being equipped with more than one biometric feature, often a combination of fingerprint and face. The main reason for the growing interest in biometrics have been the superior convenience it brings, as it eliminates the need for passwords, which are not only hard to remember, but in most cases unsecure.

How do you see that biometrics will impact digital identity?

Our devices are more and more turning into our personal authenticators. As such, protecting our digital identity becomes even more important. Using face or fingerprint like we do today is the first step towards more convenient and secure authentication.

I believe that the next step in the evolution of mobile biometrics are solutions that combine different types of biometrics and technology to verify a person, with minimal or no action by the user itself. Such solutions will provide continuous identity authentication, increasing user convenience and security.

I also believe that biometrics will go beyond self-authentication in the future. The way we use biometrics today is just the first step, soon biometrics will be everywhere, in our homes, cars and work places. They will not only be used for authentication but also for personalization and interaction with our daily interfaces.

For instance, my home will recognize me as I’m walking on the driveway and unlock the door. As I walk into the house, it will start playing my music. My car will do the same thing, for example, unlock as I approach, adjust to my settings and provide me with directions to my next location. To me, biometrics is an extremely interesting area that is far from reaching its full potential.

And how can biometrics make payments more secure and easy?

In order to execute payments and transactions totally carefree, any time, with any application or service in a secure manner, we need new type of solutions that looks beyond the way we authenticate today.

Most of today’s mobile applications require an account or registration in order to access the service. These onboarding procedures are often inconvenient or unsecure. In most cases, these apps don’t require an ID-check at onboarding, which allows false accounts and uncertainty regarding if the right person is accessing the account. Even if the user has been securely identified when creating the account, unsecure passwords can compromise security, not to mention the inconvenience passwords brings to the user.

By combining different types of biometrics with other type of metrics acquired from our smartphones, it is now possible to provide easy digital onboarding with convenient and secure customer authentication. In fact, by applying solutions for continuous authentication, user’s identity can be passively verified in the “background” when using the application, without any actions required, which increases both convenience and security.

For organisations looking to improve identity authentication of its customers, what three considerations would you offer?

My recommendations would be to take an holistic approach and consider:

• Are you onboarding customers in a way that are convenient for them?
• Do you have sufficient knowledge about the identity of your customers?
• Do you provide your customers convenient and secure authentication to your services?

If your answer to any of these questions are ”no”, biometric solutions may very well be something that can revolutionize the way you interact with customers, making it more convenient and secure.

About Precise Biometrics

Precise Biometrics is a market-leading supplier of solutions for convenient and secure authentication of people’s identity. We develop and sell fingerprint software that provide the market’s best user experience and security. Our solutions are used hundreds of millions of times every day by people all over the world and are marketed together with strong business partners.

Learn more at https://precisebiometrics.com/

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