Big U.S. technology companies Google, Apple and Microsoft are campaigning to make this the year that a new passwordless standard becomes more widely accepted, including for payments.
The companies argue the new standard not only avoids the consumer headaches of being forced to remember countless passwords, it also provides a more secure approach to e-commerce and a better guard against fraud and phishing attacks.
“This is the year,” Christiaan Brand, Google’s product manager for identity and security, declared at the American Banker media outlet’s Payments Forum in Phoenix last week. “If there isn’t a password, there is nothing to keep updated.”