Last week witnessed a mad rush for solution providers in Intelligent Authentication (IAuth) and fraud prevention to fill out their “native” capabilities voice and/or behavioral biometrics. It has been a long-time coming and is best exemplified by Mitek’s agreement to buy ID R&D for a potential $49 million. As Alexey Khitrov, founder of ID R&D explains in his post on LinkedIn, the companies had worked together for a few years and discovered, as mutual customers demanded a coordinated approach to offering a frictionless user experience for user authentication over mobile devices, they were better off working together than as partners.

Mitek is a publicly traded specialist in mobile identity verification with over $100 million in revenue. This is not huge when compared to many of the leaders in the ID&V like Ping Identity ($250 milliopn) or Okta (which saw a 43% jump in annual revenues to approach $900 million), the companies are destined to do better as a publicly traded company with a leading-edge, R&D resource providing innovative liveness detection and biometric-based authentication. This is especially true as the growth of digital, mobile commerce makes these capabilities a necessity.

Prove buys UnifyID

Speaking of $100 million: A company called Payfone (now called Prove) raised that lofty sum from venture investors in June 2020. Last week it applied some of that capital toward the acquisition of UnifyID, which brings behavioral biometrics like gait analysis into Prove’s IAuth and fraud prevention mix. Prior to the UnifyID acquisition, Prove established its reputation as a provider of “Phone-Centric Identity,” aggregating information about phone numbers from a variety of sources to help companies detect and prevent fraud.

UnifyID has leveraged investment in deploying behavioral biometrics technologies, such as gait analysis, to establish high confidence that the individual on the phone is, indeed, who he or she claims to be. Since its founding in 2015, UnifyID has succeeded in getting its software installed on 34 million devices. The two companies found themselves jointly bidding on opportunities during the course of the pandemic and have developed a seamless integration of their two technologies which now provides passive, dynamic biometric authentication. In this blog post <https://blog.unify.id/2021/06/01/unifyid-is-joining-forces-with-prove/> John Whaley, founder of UnifyID characterizes the combined offering as the “most complete mobile ID solution” because it combines Prove’s range of services in ID Verification with UnifyID’s unique way of applying behavioral biometrics.

Trueface Acquisition Addresses the Travel Vertical

The two mergers mentioned above show that strong, passive, mobile authentication is poised to take off to support digital commerce across a broad range of vertical markets. A third merger, the acquisition of facial recognition specialist Trueface by Pangiam – a “public private partnership aimed to “revolutionizing the future operations, security and safety at airports, seaports and land border crossings” – reflects how deeply passive biometric authentication will be embedded into the travel vertical.

Trueface is Pangiam’s second acquisition since its formation in October 2020. It acquired facial recognition specialist veriScan from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in March. The partnership is building solutions that address both safety and convenience in airports and other transportation venues by employing computer vision and biometrics in a way that focuses on first order challenges of facial recognition, weapon detection and age verification. While the other mergers highlight the potential for an integrated approach to authentication and fraud detection on mobile devices paves the way for speedy customer care and even payment authorization, Pangiam will put emphasis on applying machine vision and facial recognition to speed up annoying processes in the real world.

Demand for Integrated, Native IAuth is Universal

These mergers are happening because of anticipated global demand for an integrated approach to speedy, friction-free and secure ID verification and user authentication. Today enterprise fraud prevention and customer experience specialists build their IAuth and fraud prevention solutions piecemeal. They deploy what they perceive to be “best-of-breed technologies for identity management, authentication and fraud prevention solutions from an list of disparate vendors. The newly merged companies recognize that banks, brokerages, healthcare providers, airports, government agencies and, ultimately, retailers will turn away from start-ups and look to larger companies with a broad range of IAuth and fraud prevention solutions.

Incidentally, Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance probably played an important role in accelerating recognition that one of the giants in enterprise IT, CRM and collaboration now has the power to bring voice, face and behavioral biometrics into the user authentication space. In the mobile-first world of digital commerce, IAuth and Fraud Prevention are more important than ever. Solutions will come from the firms that are large enough to assure enterprises that they will be around for the long haul, but agile enough to bring the fruits of their R&D investments into the mainstream.

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