Visa Case Study

Visa recently released its ID Intelligence suite of services to help organizations better identify and authenticate users. Banks, card issuers, and even merchants are being confronted with the need to strengthen their authentication capabilities to mitigate risks and meet compliance rules under directives such as PSD2. Through this suite of services, these organizations can easily obtain the different authentication capabilities they need from a trusted provider with a single point of integration. Visa has chosen to make a FIDO-based implementation of biometrics one of these offerings as it aligns with their strategic approach to authentication.

With ID Intelligence, organization work through a single source to integrate a select set of identification and authentication solutions. These solutions fall into four categories:

• Authenticate with biometrics
• Authenticate with a photo ID and selfie
• Authenticate the data provided by the user (PII validation)
• Authenticate the device data (trusted vs. suspicious)

There is a wide variety of biometric platform providers in the market today. For ID intelligence, Visa partnered with Daon to deliver FIDO-compliant biometrics capabilities. Daon offers both a FIDO-compliant and non-FIDO solution, but only the FIDO-compliant solution is part of the ID Intelligence suite. The appeal of the FIDO protocol came from its alignment with Visa’s approach to authentication which prioritizes how best to protect user data, leverage available data to make better decision, devaluing data when it is compromised and empowering the customer.

Implementation requires an integration of the SDK with the client’s mobile application, which is typically a six to twelve month process, along with on premises hosting of the FIDO server. And while Visa is looking to extend the range of authentication solutions it offers as part of the ID Intelligence suite, the FIDO-compliant biometrics capability is available today.

This case study originally appeared in the Javelin Strategy & Research’s “The State of Strong Authentication 2019″ Report.