Bank of America Brings Biometrics to Enterprise Mobile Banking

July 5, 2018         By: Steven Anderson

It’s not every day that an advance made for the consumer market gets adopted for enterprise users. It’s much more normal to see an enterprise advance get modified for the consumer market. That’s not the case, however, with a recent move from Bank of America, which saw how well biometrics were doing as a security mechanism for consumer accounts and modified these for the enterprise market.

After a 2017 Bank of America study found an uptick in consumers turning to mobile banking apps, which got support from a Kaspersky study showing businesses were increasingly using mobile devices to access corporate accounts, it wasn’t too far a leap to suggest that perhaps more consumer-focused tools would go well for business customers.

As it turns out, business demands and regular consumers’ demands aren’t too far separate. Professionals want quick access to account and transactional information, and corporate treasurers want more insight into overall account performance and benchmark tools. This is tailor-made for mobile banking apps, which routinely offer such tools to the consumer-level user.

Thus, Bank of America brought both biometrics and embedded token technology—two powerful security system tools—to the CashPro Mobile platform. This would give corporate users access to the same level of security that normal consumers enjoyed, and on the same level of ease. Corporate banking security, reports noted, is often “cumbersome”. Though it would likely take some time for the new measures to catch on—agility is not a high point of enterprise-level businesses—once they did, they would likely stay in place.

It’s not surprising to see enterprise customers want consumer-level material; after all, most enterprises are run by consumers, who probably don’t mind a touch of the familiar in their overall operations. It makes them feel competent, and improves their user experience. So why wouldn’t businesses offer business customers tools similar to those said users would use when they’re off the clock?

It’s likely to work well for Bank of America; biometrics are a powerful and easy-to-use security tool. Throw in the tokens and it only gets better. Bank of America’s move to offer familiar security measures shouldn’t really have a downside at all, and should end well for both the user and Bank of America, whose customers now have more reason than ever to stick around.