Securing Mobile Financial Access

Working with financial institutions to provide risk management solutions against the constant evolution of threats, Early Warning is building an ecosystem that will continue to match up with the threat over time. With no direct link itself to the end user, Early Warning’s strategy is collaboration among companies with their own expertise and a consortium model in sharing data among participating financial services organizations (FSOs).

Early Warning announced a strategic alliance in April with BioCatch, a global leader in behavioral biometrics, authentication and malware detection. This enables the FSOs to gain and share behavioral intelligence to improve visibility of digital threats to reduce new account fraud and account takeover while simultaneously improving their users’ experience.

In fact, Early Warning CMO/CSO Kyle Thomas emphasizes that the efforts are “more about making life easier to the good people, and not just about catching the bad people. The goal is to make the experience better for the end-user in a secure atmosphere.” This recognizes that security must also consider the spectrum of risk. At one end might be a user wanting to simply look at his or her account balance, whereas a wire transfer of a large sum of money involves greater risk. “We can lock it down so much that no one can get in — including the user,” Thomas says.

Security today requires a layered approach rather than a single way for a user to access his account. To facilitate that, Early Warning has also acquired Authentify, Inc. Thomas explains that Authentify’s platform contains application programming interfaces that enable many authenticators to be plugged into it.

One type of authenticator is physical, such as a thumbprint, photo or retinal scan. There is also behavioral tracking and actual access. Says Thomas, “We can find out if the phone being used is registered with the person right now, then look at, ‘Is he or she holding it in the same way they usually do and are they going through a pattern of behavior consistent with their person?’”