There has been a significant shift towards mobile payments and digital wallets over the past year and half. Before the pandemic digital wallet usage was already trending upward, but COVID has shifted that trend into high gear.

Many investors are drawn to the crypto space because of the promise of anonymity, decentralization, and return on investment, sparking an explosion in the number of crypto investors over the past few years. However, these same appeals make the space vulnerable to fraudsters who exploit even seasoned crypto veterans. The influx of capital into the crypto market has, in turn, led to a rapid growth in fraud and potentially other illicit activities. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), October 2020 to June 2021 saw consumers reporting losses of $80m due to crypto-investment fraud, and one has to imagine that number drastically under-represents reality by some margin.

Authentication demonstrates a highly important security issue for online companies of any type, with unauthorized access representing 43% of successful data breaches at businesses in the US in 2020. Customer losses from identity fraud added up to $56 billion in 2020, and 53% of United States federal, state and local government bureaus have seen an increase in account takeover fraud in the past couple of years.

There is a line of thought that exists - banks actually do not care about fraud because they can write off the losses as a deduction against their tax burden. This is similar to the methodology banks use to remove bad loans from their books.

FIDO2 is an abbreviation for Fast Identity Online, it is designed to solve the world’s password problem. Today, the primary method for logging into a website or app is to use a password, however passwords are a weakness when it comes to fraud prevention. Besides being a major vulnerability for businesses, passwords are also an inconvenience for customers. More than eighty percent of data breaches (avg loss of $3.9M) can be directly tied to passwords with the price of resetting a password via a help desk averaging about $70. The password problem also negatively impacts conversion rates. Online merchants can expect to see a cart abandonment of about 30% caused by lost passwords.

Improving customer experience and retention by reducing account takeover should be the goal of every financial services provider. Strong identity verification bound to strong authentication protects your customer’s data, gives assurances around customer authenticity when interacting and helps eliminate account takeovers. Solutions such as LoginID help financial institutions, banks and card issues to integrate strong authentication and identity verification.