Early Warning, a trusted leader in fraud prevention and risk management, has taken steps to dramatically advance the state of mobile authentication technologies.
Through an equity investment and commercial agreement with Payfone, a leading mobile authentication company, Early Warning will now provide carrier-based device and account owner identity authentication combined with unrivaled financial transaction and identity data, ensuring a secure and seamless mobile experience for financial services customers.
Mobile devices are becoming a proxy for identity. Therefore, verifying mobile device ownership is a critical first step in effective mobile authentication. Through the services to be offered by Early Warning, financial institutions and payment processors gain a higher level of identity and device confidence to more assuredly authorize mobile transactions and protect carrier subscribers.
By integrating with the network-based authentication capabilities of tier one mobile carriers via Payfone, Early Warning will provide a deterministic level of mobile identity that far surpasses traditional and device-centric authentication measures. By leveraging the same SIM card-based network authentication that mobile operators use to secure their own services, Early Warning can verify account logins and financial transactions with more precision and convenience. Furthermore, common events such as managing lost and stolen phones, changing mobile carriers and porting phone numbers are managed in real-time without involvement from the consumer.
"Financial institutions have seen significant adoption of banking on mobile devices, such that the number of annual mobile transactions will exceed 10 billion by 2015," said Jason Malo, research director for CEB TowerGroup. "Security and authentication for this channel is critical, and mobile devices are up to the challenge, affording an opportunity to bring user, device, and network identity to bear in support of a defense-in-depth authentication strategy."
Paul Finch, CEO of Early Warning, said, "The current authentication system must do more to protect the consumer and the global fifinancial system as mobile has become a critical channel for banking and commerce. Passwords, knowledge-based questions and even device-centric security are insufficient protection from malware and identity-related breaches. The traditional convenience versus security trade-off has reached its limit. Now, through real-time integration with mobile carriers via Payfone, Early Warning provides an entirely new level of mobile security while delivering a streamlined mobile experience."
"The Internet has no identity infrastructure in its plumbing, while the mobile carriers authenticate identity in real-time for billions of consumers based on global GSMA and CDMA standards. Payfone brings this deep network-based identity authentication that effectively underwrites more than $300 billion in telecom services annually to financial institutions. It was only a matter of time that these two worlds converged," said Payfone CEO Rodger Desai.