Describe your service/platform/product and how it’s using FIDO authentication.
Our mobile banking app is our bank’s largest branch, serving over 1,200,000 customers each month. These customers require the best protection against identity theft attacks, and we provide the most robust and innovative solutions, always prioritizing the best user experience. ABANCA Key is a new identity verification service based on FIDO standards. It was launched after years of research by leading players to prevent identity theft attacks. Using passkeys, ABANCA Key provides the highest level of protection. It is impossible to guess or reuse them, so they protect our customers’ private information from attackers.
What were the challenges you were trying to overcome?
On one hand, there’s the security challenge. The rise of phishing through calls and SMS messages in Spain has become a plague and a real problem for administrations, mobile operators, and financial institutions but on the other hand, there was the need to maintain the best user experience with the least friction. Passkeys give us a framework for interoperability and standardization, which provides us with ease of implementation and deployment. However, above all, and for the first time in the security industry, it provides a framework of homogeneity to achieve a frictionless user experience.
Why did you choose FIDO authentication over other options? What did you identify as advantages of implementing FIDO?
We chose FIDO for many reasons: for its future strategy, as it allows us to follow many ways, including MFA and passwordless, for trust, as the FIDO Alliance includes leading players in security, operating systems, infrastructure, and mobile ecosystem; and for the standardization and homogenization what it give us, which reduces implementation, deployment and roll out times.
Describe your roll out of FIDO authentication.
To deliver the best user experience, we’re committed to having the deepest possible understanding of the technology. This enables us to effectively identify and resolve issues, and to better understand user behavior. We became our own partner by developing our own platform based on the FIDO standard and certifying it as if it were a provider.
We rolled out the deployment in phases. In under five months, we had the development of both server and front-end (iOS and Android) ready, and we began the rollout in an initial phase with our employees, and subsequently to end customers in batches. In just seven months, we were already in a general roll out to all customers.
What data points can you share that show the impact FIDO authentication has had?
- More than 42% of our customers are already using ABANCA Key
- More than 11,000,000 high-risk transactions has been protected with ABANCA Key without technical or service incidents
- Customer roll out ran without technical or service incidents, and most importantly, with our customer journey UX to sign in ABANCA Key and to use it, we’ve managed a Customer Effort Score (CES) of 4.7.
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