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Best Practices Every Bank Should Know Part #1: Biometric MFA

Cybercrime increased by over 300% last year, mounting to over $945B in losses globally in 2020. Just to put that in perspective, that is equivalent to over 1% of the global GDP! Every year!

Who is being targeted? EVERYONE.

From the bank and credit union executives that I speak to, this has traditionally been keeping up the CIO’s, CTO’s and CISO’s. Lately however, this problem is not just a “back of mind” concept for senior executives. CEOs, board members, and CFOs are worried: “Are we one bad attack away from losing our job?” The answer is undoubtedly, “Yes!”

The damage from a security breach isn’t just someone stealing a few million dollars; the real damage is stealing confidential customer information, which ultimately will result in several issues: damage to your brand, customers leaving you for a competitor, fines from the government, and potentially even bankruptcy. The average cost for a breach is $3.86, but have gone as high as $4B.

Now that we know the problem: “How do we protect our company; how do we protect our customers; how do we protect our jobs?”

Simply put, the biggest risk is undoubtedly fraudsters leveraging PASSWORDS. Over 80% of all cybercrime leverages passwords, and we (as humans) make it easy for cybercriminals. 49% of all passwords are reused; in fact, 13% of people reuse the same password for EVERYTHING. Discover one password, get access to everything: email, bank account, cell phone login, and more.

So how do we get rid of passwords? One word: BIOMETRICS.

Biometrics move the onus from someone remembering and reusing passwords to leveraging their person to successfully log in, in a secure manner. Biometrics cannot be copied, they cannot be phished, they cannot be scammed, they cannot be stolen.

So how do you use biometrics to log in?

That’s where ImageWare comes in: ImageWare Authenticate is an easy-to-use multimodal biometric authenticator. Boiled down, we enable a user to log in without passwords by simply leveraging their face, finger, palm, voice, iris, or other modality. No special equipment, just a smartphone with a camera.

So where should I use biometrics? EVERYWHERE!

Biometrics should be used everywhere: physical access for employees to office spaces, digital/logical access to your computer/workstation, member/end customer and employee logins to any application or portal. The more you move away from passwords, or rather, the more you move towards leveraging biometrics, the greater the security of your end-to-end system.

When should I get started? TODAY, DO NOT WAIT!

We have a team of professionals who can help you get started in minutes. We can integrate into your applications with OIDC, SAML, or our APIs and SDK , deploying a fully integrated Cloud based system up within 2 weeks. Sign up for a demo or start a free trial today!Try

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My final advice:

Do not wait for a security breach to make a change. Act in haste to protect YOUR company, YOUR customers, and YOUR job today. We will print out the sign to hang on your door: