Case study

Fintech reduces the use of facial biometrics in Mobile App and slashes authentication costs by 51% by implementing Incognia

A Fintech providing retail financial services and private label credit cards implements Incognia location identity to increase authentication security and at the same time enabling significant savings in authentication costs.

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Results

  • 51%
    cost reduction associated with biometric authentication
  • 45%
    reduction in use of facial biometrics
  • ZERO
    account takeover for users opting-in to share location
Finance app — Head of fraud prevention
(5 out of 5)

"Incognia's solution has helped us prevent account takeover theft fraud in our application generating savings of millions. It has also helped us reduce costs with easy biometrics, and reduce friction in our customers' security rules.”

Company Profile

Fintech focused on retail finance, accepted in more than 38,000 stores with 500K+ users, $460B in transactions in 2021 with a mobile App for iOS and Android.

The Challenge

As an initial step in increasing account security, the Fintech had implemented an additional Face Biometric step in their authentication flow, to protect the newly introduced “high value” financial features. Unfortunately, this new security step was viewed as “high friction” by a relevant percentage of their users, particularly by elderly users and users not familiar with technology. In addition the newly added biometric security step had added significant costs to the Fintech authentication flow.

The Fintech wanted to balance the account security of its users and optimize the in-app experience, while at the same time lower its costs by reducing the use of the facial biometrics solution used in the application.

The Background

A Fintech with 500,000 active users on its mobile app planned to add new financial features for its users, including the capability to purchase 3rd party coupons and the capability to request and obtain personal loans. In anticipation of a growth in fraud attempts based on the new financial features the Fintech wanted to increase its account security and fraud protection. The Fintech selected to use Incognia location identity to enable Zero-Factor Authentication for increased account security during user authentication.

The Solution

The Fintech implemented Incognia's Zero-Factor Authentication solution into the user authentication flow, protecting the user's journey at login and securing other sensitive transactions performed in the application. Incognia provides a risk assessment based on location behavior, device intelligence, watchlists and the analysis of network environments.

  • Each time Incognia provides a “LOW” risk assessment, the Biometric authentication step is skipped and users can access their accounts in a frictionless manner.

  • When incognia provides a “HIGH” risk assessment, then a Biometric authentication step is triggered so that higher friction is only reserved to higher risk cases.

With this authentication flow, legitimate users are able to enjoy a simple login process covering the majority of consumer profiles. At the same time the Fintech achieved cost savings by only using biometric authentication for high-risk cases.

How Incognia works

Whenever a user tries to access their Fintech account, the Incognia SDK, integrated into the Fintech app, has access to location and device intelligence data from that device. This is possible because of Incognia proprietary location technology, which combines location sensors and device intelligence to build a persistent fingerprint associated with the user. Each user has a unique location behavior, and this pattern is constantly updated by Incognia, like a dynamic identifier, that is extremely difficult to forge and therefore resilient to spoofing. To validate transactions or authenticate the user, Incognia verifies, in the background, the location behavior of that user, composed of trusted locations, to distinguish legitimate user from fraudsters in real time and prevent account theft. Incognia's statistics show that 90% of user logins,and 95% of sensitive transactions occur from trusted locations. In this sense, you can check the trusted locations associated with the device to ensure its security and avoid adding friction.

how-incognia-works-fintech-whitelabel


Applying Incognia in a waterfall, before the Biometric solution in the customer journey, the Fintech was able to reduce by 51% the cost of their authentication flow.

“The main strategies involved in the implementation of the solution were to improve our in-app security, reduce costs for low-risk biometric requests, and provide a better experience to our customers. One of the aspects that differentiates this project is the support we had from the Incognia team. We have weekly meetings to discuss results, best practices around strategy, and opportunities for improvement”

W. M. - Head of Fraud Prevention and Authorization @ Fintech

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