I just returned from the four-day Money 20/20 event in Las Vegas. The show covers the overlap of Money and Technology including FinTech, Payment, Ecommerce and more. It had tens of thousands of attendees, over 3,500 companies, and 400 startups and lots of starpower including Richard Branson, Shaquille O’Neil, Akon, and yours truly speaking on a biometrics panel.

I walked the show floor to find the latest news in embedded biometrics and to better understand the choice between embedded and cloud based biometrics in the fintech/money space. I was impressed by how biometrics has moved into the mainstream conversation. Before mentioning the other companies I talked to, I’ll kick off with Sensory, my company.

Sensory’s focus on AI and biometrics has always been on the embedded side. We believe in data privacy and we think the best way to accomplish that is through keeping in the hands and control of the user. On a less promotional front there is also a strategic reason we focus on embedded, and that’s because the industry giants are really good at cloud based and unconstrained AI tasks, and they often give it away for free, so we are focused on a place where the Googles and Amazons of the world can be our customers and not just our competitors. On the last day of Money 20/20, Sensory introduced TrulySecure 4.0, a fusion of face and voice biometrics with improved accuracy, speed, and support for 3D.

BioConnect sponsored one of the excellent lunches at the show. I spoke to Rob Douglas, Founder and CEO of BioConnect who said, “We are on the quest for rightful identity and what we offer is a market leading mobile biometric authentication solution for the enterprise. We provide a building block like a piece of LEGO that you can apply into all the infrastructure of an Enterprise to upgrade from passwords and key fobs to a world where you have higher assurance when you are conducting digital or physical transactions.” BioConnect has been in business for eight years and has 1,600 customers and at Money 20/20, the Bank of Montreal announced a partnership with BioConnect and IBM.  

BioConnect has a strong belief in face authentication, but also works with other biometrics including voice, eye, fingerprint, and behavioral. According to Douglas, “We believe in both cloud and client and we support the FIDO approach, but there are use cases where the transport of the biometrics through a cloud-based infrastructure can make a lot of sense.”

The FIDO Alliance had a large area with alliance members touting their wares. FIDO (fast identity online) is “the World’s Largest Ecosystem for Standards-Based, Interoperable Authentication.” I spoke to Andrew Shikiar, the CMO of the FIDO Alliance. Local authentication with biometrics is key to the FIDO approach. “Whether you are storing passwords or biometrics, a central repository will be targeted, and will be breached to be used in nefarious ways.” When I asked Shikiar about the desire to share biometrics across platforms he said, “That’s typical of the type of use case that our technical working groups are working to address, while leveraging the FIDO standards”

Conor White, President Americas at Daon described Daon as “a human authentication company that provides technologies to allow customers to create and manage digital identities of their users in a way that’s advantageous in a risk and security perspective.” At the show they announced a partnership to expand from their base in mobile into the contact center.

Daon provides support to a wide cross section of biometrics and provides embedded solutions through the FIDO standard but can support cloud based biometrics when desired. Daon is seeing more customers getting comfortable with going from on premise to cloud based implementations but in the vast majority of cases, the biometrics still resides on the device even if the service is run in the cloud. White sits on the board of the FIDO alliance and sees the FIDO standard with embedded biometrics gaining ground.

Veritran is a software company based in Buenos Aires and developing innovative and secure digital banking platforms for the Latin American markets. They process over 4 billion banking transactions each year, and they are now expanding from Banking into other Enterprise markets and geographies beyond Latin America. At Mobile World Congress in February, they announced a new platform for secure application development, and at Money 20/20 ,they demonstrated some of the apps developed on this platform.

Like other companies, Veritran offers a mix of biometric modalities and in talking with Veritran’s CEO Marcelo Gonzales, I learned a very interesting reason as to why they prefer embedded biometrics instead of processing in the cloud. The Latin American customers buy prepaid plans with limited data. To keep their costs down, they must keep their data usage down, and with the biometrics stored and processed on the device, transactions can occur with minimal data costs.

There were a lot of other companies at Mobile 20/20. As a quick summary I would say a few important things stood out. Biometrics are definitely taking off as we all understand the problems with passwords. A variety of biometric modalities are offered but there does seem to be a preference and movement toward face authentication that can run cross platform without specialized hardware. Most vendors offer a choice between having the biometric data stored and processed on the device or in the cloud, but with the FIDO Alliance behind embedded and the clear advantages for security and privacy, the embedded usage case seems to be winning out.