Authentication in the payments space is continuously evolving.
But one constant is that any innovation needs to strike a winning balance between enhancing security and improving user experience.
“Identity theft, phishing and data breaches have all become more prevalent. So, more robust authentication has become crucial to ensuring that the person is the right person involved in a transaction, that they are who they claim to be,” Mike Storiale, vice president of innovation development at Synchrony, told PYMNTS for the series “What’s Next in Payments: Authentication: What’s New and What’s Next?”
Traditionally, payment authentication has revolved around three tenets: something the user knows (passwords), something the user has (cards or phones), and something the user is (biometrics like fingerprints or facial recognition).
However, the landscape is changing rapidly, with multifactor authentication gaining prevalence, and the benefits of modern approaches, including biometrics and tokenization, increasingly contrast favorably against more traditional, probabilistic methods like card and phone verification.