BMO Financial Group corporate cardholders soon will be able
to use fingerprints or photographs of themselves to authenticate online transactions.
BMO and MasterCard are piloting the program with "several hundred" BMO
employees in the United States and Canada, BMO vice president of North American
corporate card products Steve Pedersen told BTN,
and the feature will go live by July.
Users enroll through MasterCard's Identity Check mobile app,
which is available for Android and iOS. Their smartphones store fingerprint
biometrics, while facial biometric data is encrypted and stored on MasterCard
servers with multiple layers of security, not on BMO's systems, Pedersen said.
The photo option exists for those with older phones that do not have
fingerprint biometrics capability.
The biometric authentication comes into play when MasterCard
and BMO notice an online transaction that is risky or outside a user's buying
pattern. At that point, the app requests additional authentication and, after
receiving it, prompts the user to return to the purchase screen to complete the
transaction.
The U.S. payments industry has made in-person
credit card transactions more secure by introducing chip technology via Europay,
MasterCard and Visa chip technology, but the issue of how to make card-not-present
transactions more secure has persisted. The BMO technology provides an
additional level of security for payments that are not performed in-person,
Pedersen said. "Chip is really helping out in the ecosystem, tightening up
that whole part of the process, but at the same time, the industry has been
working heavily on what we can do on the digital lens. This is leveraging biometrics
capability, which already exists within smartphones, to do an extra level of
authentication."