Visa Europe will join the alliance as a sponsor member and will be represented on the board by Visa Inc.

"Strong authentication is vitally important as the future of payments becomes increasingly mobile and digital," said Mark Nelsen, head of risk products and business intelligence, Visa Inc. "As payment technologies continue to advance, an open, scalable and interoperable framework will support a move away from simple, static password-based authentication and towards more advanced methods that will improve security as well as enable more frictionless, convenient commerce."

"With the addition of Visa to the FIDO Alliance board, our leadership includes the world's leading payments networks and services providers. Though FIDO specifications are not currently designed to address all aspects of secure payments, it's clear that payments technologies and services are fundamental to the development of better authentication that is capable of overcoming the risks and limitations associated with password dependencies that date back a half century," said FIDO Alliance president Michael Barrett. "We welcome Visa to the FIDO Alliance board and to the forefront of stronger and easier-to-use authentication."

FIDO Alliance members commit to share technology and collaborate to deliver open specifications for universal strong authentication that enables FIDO-compliant authentication methods to be interoperable, more secure and private, and easier-to-use.

FIDO specifications will support a full range of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint, eye and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition, as well as further enabling existing solutions and communications standards, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), USB Security Tokens, embedded Secure Elements (eSE), Smart Cards, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). The open specifications are being designed to be extensible and to accommodate future innovation, as well as protect existing investments. FIDO specifications allow the interaction of technologies within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations.