What Is Behavioral Biometrics?

Stopping fraud before it enters your digital ecosystem starts with confidently differentiating genuine transactions from suspicious activities. Behavioral biometrics is a passive and proactive way to identify and understand individual usage patterns at the start of a transaction so your business can:

• Detect signals of automation
• Isolate anomalies in typical behaviors
• Target typical fraudulent behavior

Behavioral biometrics technology can flag any session which appears non-human or where the behavior doesn't match the account owner's normal behavior. It monitors multiple aspects of digital interactions: how users hold devices, how much pressure touchscreens receive, typing rhythm, mouse movements and more. Advanced solutions gather this individual data and analyze it via machine learning, enabling an organization to passively verify the user and ensure that they are who they say they are.

Types of Behavioral Biometrics verification signals

Phone Movement

Is the phone being held in a landscape or portrait position? What is the rotation or angle of the phone? Do the sensors match the situation?

Touchscreen Behavior

How is the touchscreen used? How much pressure is being applied? What is the swipe speed and motion?

Keyboard Behavior

How is a keyboard used? What is the typing rhythm? Were any special keys pressed? Were any keyboard shortcuts taken?

Mouse Behavior

How does the mouse move around the page? Does it ever go off the page? Are there signs of automation? Are there any latency anomalies?

Advanced Behavioral Biometrics Supports Safe and Low-Friction Experiences

Companies offering online services work continuously to keep bad actors out and let legitimate customers in. The easy answer is to add more security measures, but undue friction negatively impacts user experience. Some customers may abandon transactions rather than prove their legitimacy.

Balancing fraud risk with a positive, online experience is paramount. Consumers value security and a convenient process.

Many traditional identity verification and authentication strategies lack the capacity to address the nuances of digital commerce journeys and the complex nature of digital threat vectors. Even digitally driven fraud prevention tools can add customer barriers, or be intercepted and overcome by fraudsters. 

Organizations need a more dynamic view of customer identities and transaction risk via multi-dimensional digital, physical and behavioral identity context. The ability to passively verify identities and authenticate trusted customers while maintaining a risk-appropriate level of friction helps keep digital transactions in efficient motion. Behavioral biometrics can play an integral role in facilitating these low-friction journeys, working in the background of digital events without any additional inputs required from the customer as they interact online.

The Many Challenges of Fraud

Expanding digital economies are creating exponential opportunities for fraud. Data from the LexisNexis® Digital Identity Network® reveals a rise in global digital transaction volume of 37% YOY to 39.4B transactions from January to June 2022. Human-initiated attacks have increased in frequency 32% over the past year, and high-velocity automated bot attacks grew by 38% YOY across industries globally.

In a highly competitive digital environment, companies are prioritizing digital processes to reduce the amount of information they request directly from customers, knowing that complex authentication steps may cause transaction failure or abandonment. Without proper identity verification or authentication steps, fraudsters jump in and seize the opportunity to open accounts and act fast with money transfers and other fraud.

Most fraud prevention methods detect attacks by searching only for potentially harmful anomalies. If an authentic user does anything unusual – such as logging in from a new location or using a new device – the action may be flagged as an anomaly and trigger a false positive. 

With organizations using multiple layers of anomaly focused identity verification and authentication tools to minimize fraud, anomalies abound. As a result, organizations must contend with an overload of false positives, which require costly manual reviews that cause delays and contribute to a negative customer experience. 

As fraud detection solutions get more advanced and harder to breach, end consumers have become the perfect vector for fraud networks to manipulate and monetize. A dramatic global rise in various forms of scams and social engineering continues to concern not only financial services companies but businesses across multiple industries.

Organizations are also grappling with fraudsters who know the weaknesses of common fraud prevention solutions and expertly understand how to evade these systems. They are adept at social engineering, man-in-the-browser, malware, remote access tools and other techniques to bypass or manipulate device and location checks. Balancing false positives, security and user experience continues to challenge organizations of all sizes.

A Complementary Layer to Identity Trust and Fraud Prevention

Layering defense solutions is the key to protect against the full spectrum of attacks as fraud attacks are becoming more sophisticated than ever before.

Device intelligence, digital identity insights and smart authentication solutions can benefit from the extra layer of fortification delivered by behavioral biometrics to access deeper intelligence on the full context surrounding a digital transaction. Behavioral biometrics provides an additional layer of defense to risk assessment without creating a negative user experience, minimizing false positives, increasing trust and reducing fraud risk.

The combination of behavioral biometrics and digital identity intelligence creates a new shade in the spectrum of identity; helping businesses confidently differentiate between fraudster and legitimate customer, and between humans and bots.

Deploy a Silent Superpower Solution With Leading Behavioral Biometrics

LexisNexis® BehavioSec® has a self-learning fraud prevention approach that helps to mitigate risk now and in the future—offering continuous protection at each interaction across the customer journey.