Businesses delivering digital products and services surged during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic when people increasingly turned to online options for healthcare, financial products and services, retail, and more. This meteoric rise has also sparked a significant increase in cybercrimes – up 40% over the past two years. A group of telecom and tech industry experts representing @TMobile, @AuthenticIDInc, @iconectiv, and @Telesign joined a panel today at Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas to discuss the issue of cybercrime, and how industry collaboration on various customer authentication solutions can help industry fight back.

Panelists discussed the wide variety of customer authentication and verification solutions now available to enterprises, including linking digital profiles (i.e., online account activity) to offline characteristics (i.e., name, address, DOB); using biometric information for authentication; and leveraging fraud prevention APIs powered by device and network identifiers, among other things. These tools can be used in a variety of use cases, including account authorizations, form filling, SIM swaps, and payments. The panel also discussed authentication with respect to calls and the deployment of STIR/SHAKEN for call authentication. A critical point that the panelists agreed on was that there is no one “silver bullet” to stem the cybercrime tide, and these tools must be combined to effectively protect and mitigate against fraud and identity theft.

The panelists also coalesced around the point that while industry has made progress in the fight against well-funded cyber criminal groups, there is much more work to be done. Specifically, the group noted that there is a need for: stronger identity proofing; more frequent usage of biometrics for high-risk authentication use cases; and simpler solutions that consumers can adopt and trust.

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