FinSphere linking the mobile to consumers
Visa deal brings location confirmation to the payments market
03 March, 2015
category: Corporate, Digital ID, Financial
Linking an individual to the location of a specific transaction is often discussed but hard to do. Using geo-location from a mobile device to make sure that an individual is in the same location of a payment or authentication request is one of the core tenants of an adaptive authentication system and FinSphere is now bringing this to payments world.
The seven-year-old company has a focus on using the mobile device as an identity proxy, says Mike Buhrmann, chairman and CEO at FinSphere. The company announced a deal with Visa Inc. to use the Mobile Location Confirmation technology with some of its credit card issuers.
Mobile Location Confirmation uses Finsphere’s geo-location technology combined with other information sources to predict whether the actual cardholder or an unauthorized user is attempting to make a payment with a Visa card. That determination can be important to avoiding the delays that confront merchants, cardholders and card issuers worldwide when legitimate transactions are denied for suspected fraud.
Mobile Location Confirmation is built into a credit card issuer’s mobile application, Buhrmann says. Consumers would have to opt in to enable the system on their mobile device but after that it would run in the background and not require any input from the consumer.
It also runs on a broad geographic pattern, Buhrmann says. For example, if a consumer forgets his mobile device at home and runs down the street to buy a coffee the transaction won’t be declined. “We just need to know that you’re in the general area,” he explains. “We just want to know that you and your phone are in the area but not specifically at Macy’s.”
Financial service was the first market FinSphere wanted to explore but it is also looking at applications in the enterprise authentication and access management markets and health care as well, Buhrmann says. ”We’re looking at leveraging something you already have and use the password but then pinning the second factor to an identity score, similar to the technology we have running in the background in the banking market,” he explains.