OREANDA-NEWS. October 11, 2016. “As the digital and physical worlds converge, fraudsters are shifting their efforts to the digital realm,” writes Nachiketa Mitra. “Three technologies—biometrics, social analytics and blockchain—show promise for payment processing.” Excerpts:

“Biometrics. Because user IDs and passwords are fairly easily compromised, firms are moving towards biometrics, the technologies that authenticate people through fingerprint, retina, voice or face recognition. The most secure approach to biometrics is to authenticate users directly on the device. This removes the motivation for thieves to hack into central servers in search of personally identifiable information.

Social Analytics. When we interact with people and organizations online, we leave a digital trail of clicks, likes, comments, geotags and so forth. In that trail, there’s a pattern that tells a story of who we are. Cognitive analytics and machine learning analyze these patterns. It turns out that social behaviors often correlate with personally identifiable information. This raises the possibility of authenticating customers by studying their social footprints to verify their identity.

Blockchain. Blockchain records immutable transactions in a distributed digital ledger, shared among many parties. Those parties can authenticate one another via universal identifiers secured within the distributed ledger. Combined with identity verification, blockchain offers greater control over personal information. Every online transaction could potentially bear the watermark of each party’s digital ID. This way, it becomes possible to validate identity in real time, reducing the need for intermediaries and making it harder to commit fraud.

Biometrics, social analytics and blockchain are the future of secure payments. Digital identity verification hold promise to help the payments industry outwit fraudsters.”