By Andrew Shikiar, Senior Director of Marketing at FIDO Alliance
FIDO Alliance is back from Money20/20 in Las Vegas, where we continued to spread the word about how we are enabling simpler, stronger authentication for payments over a busy (and productive!) four days.
On the agenda, discussions around mobile payments, the various “Pay” wallets, EMV migration, authentication and biometrics dominated. It was only fitting, then, that the show kicked off Monday morning with an announcement from the FIDO Alliance, covering all of these hot topics.
FIDO News @ Money20/20

FIDO Alliance Executive Director Brett McDowell was joined on stage by EMVCo’s Director of Operations Brian Byrne to announce that the FIDO Alliance will work with EMVCo to develop a new technical specification for mobile wallet providers and payment application developers to support Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method (CDCVM). This will enable consumers to conveniently use on-device FIDO® Certified authenticators – such as a fingerprint or “selfie” biometrics – to securely verify their presence when making in-store or in-app mobile payments. The specification will be developed as an extension to the Web Authentication specification already in development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This specification will greatly simplify the development and support for CDCVM across mobile devices and other platforms. Watch this space as we announce updates on the development of the W3C Web Authentication specification and this extension specification in the coming months.
The FIDO Ecosystem Pavilion
For those less familiar with FIDO authentication, the announcement drew a lot of attendees to the FIDO Ecosystem Pavilion to learn more. At the pavilion, members AustriaCard, Aware, Inc., Egis Technology, Inc., Excelsecu, Feitian, Infineon, Nok Nok Labs, and TRUXTUN Capital showed off their innovative FIDO® Certified products for the financial services and payments sectors. Inside the pavilion, we also featured 40 of the hardware-, mobile- and biometrics-based devices from throughout the FIDO ecosystem providing simpler, stronger authentication.



Moving Forward
Overall, the feedback from attendees that toured the pavilion was agreement that the payments industry as a whole needs to move beyond passwords, and excitement over how strong authentication can be super simple. We want to give a big thanks to all of our members that took part in the pavilion and/or the FIDO Device Showcase — and also to the hundreds of visitors who took time to learn more about FIDO and our members throughout the show floor. We hope to have an even larger presence next year in order to support the rapidly growing and evolving FIDO ecosystem!
MORE Building the Business Case