Ant Financial Picks Up EyeVerify, May Have New Biometric Edge

Biometrics—using certain biological characteristics as security and authentication tools—has been regarded by some like myself as perhaps the ultimate in online security measures.

Now, Ant Financial—the folks behind Alipay—have recently made a big move in favor of biometrics, as it bought EyeVerify, who creased the Eyeprint ID biometric system.

Eyeprint ID is a Fast ID entity Online (FIDO)-certified system, which makes it a prime addition to the security operations of mobile devices, particularly mobile payments systems.

This is actually a step up from Alipay’s current use of biometrics, which uses facial recognition, generally seen as one of the weaker sources of biometric identification.

Eye vein pattern—or eyeprint—recognition is a significant step up, however, and may be working to reassure users about the security involved with Alipay.

It helps that EyeVerify itself has won its share of accolades of late. It got a Best of Show award at FinovateEurope 2016, and Visa put it to work on a trial basis for its Visa Now app.

That gives it a lot of field credibility, a point made clear and expounded on by EyeVerify CEO Toby Rush, who noted “Our payment-grade biometric platform is already trusted by over three dozen banks and technology leaders, and we look forward to helping even more people across the financial spectrum access digital services with security and convenience.”

Biometrics are generally superior to most login combinations, particularly password and username, even two-factor authentication, because it’s comparatively easy to spoof such a system using brute force or man-in-the-middle attacks.

Plus, users often don’t want to establish properly strong passwords as they’re difficult to remember. Biometrics depend on things that can’t readily be faked, like anatomy presentation, and are always on hand.

Your eye, your thumb, your face…these things are always available, and using these as a password is much simpler than remembering the chopped salad of numbers, letters, symbols and associated noises that go into a “strong” password.

Seeing what Ant Financial does with EyeVerify should be interesting, and like as not, Alipay users will be logging in with a look at a camera before too much longer has passed.