The tail-end of 2017 was witness to numerous predictions supporting the view that Intelligent Authentication would see “hockey-stick” growth during 2018. And with a flurry of activity in just the last couple weeks from the likes of Facebook, Nuance, AWS and ThreatMetrix, Intelligent Authentication (#IAuth) looks set to have a bumper year. Here below are a few notable announcements, and while certainly not exhaustive, these news items point to the trends we expect to see throughout 2018.

Opus Research has been tracking enrolled voiceprints since 2014, and have stayed true to the belief that there will be come a positive tipping point. Well, we believe this has finally arrived with Nuance’s announcement of the long awaited “biometric boom,” evidenced by the achievement of the significant milestone of 300 million enrolled consumer voiceprints, with more than five billion successful voice authentications yearly across its voice security solutions. This is set to grow with a range of additional use cases for Voice Biometrics, such as Nuance’s further announcement on the range of new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities for its Dragon Drive automotive platform. These capabilities not only give the driver and passengers a rich combination of non-verbal modalities such as gaze detection — enabling drivers to get information about and interact with places outside the car simply by looking at them — but also an enhanced spoken interface with the ‘Just Talk’ capability that includes a natural dialogue with the automotive intelligent assistant that is able to identify the specific passenger through the use of Voice Biometrics.

On the Identification side, Facebook, one of the first digital giants to offer social sign-on via its ‘Login with Facebook’ service, announced its acquisition of Confirm.io, a Boston-based company that digitally verifies users based on their government-issued ID documents. This will enhance Facebook’s ability to reset logins for accounts that have been hijacked or locked out, not to mention stronger identity assertion during registration which will go a long way towards curbing bogus accounts as well as ‘bot’ profiles.

When it comes to protecting sensitive customer information, last year was a nightmare for security professionals, especially in the wake of high profile data breaches such as Equifax, Yahoo, Uber and a wide range of government and private enterprises. Legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enforceable beginning May 26, 2018, is also driving businesses managing large customer databases to significantly improve their protection of personally identifiable (PII) information processes and technologies.

Amazon Web Service’s acquisition of Sqrrl, another Boston-based company founded in 2012 by former US government security officials with ties back to the NSA and White House cyber security, is a clear move by the largest cloud infrastructure provider to protect sensitive enterprise customer data. Among the range of diverse real-time and predictive security defenses, Sqrrl is also able to identify suspicious behaviors and even the perpetrators, pertaining to user Identity and Access Management (IAM). This is a high priority for the global security fraternity in the wake of large scale data breach disasters at mega consumer-data holders mentioned above.

In a similar move, the acquisition of ThreatMetrix, by the Relx Group also enhances the group’s Risk and Business Analytics fraud and authentication capabilities. ThreatMetrix, founded in 2005, is a digital identity platform that uses over 250 factors, from device information to location to anonymized identity, to distinguish normal from suspicious user behavior.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Authentication, Articles