BioCatch has raised US$10million to expand its behavioural biometric authentication platform. The service collects and analyses more than 400 behavioural signals and is used by banks to detect suspicious behaviour online. It is now also available to online merchants to manage high-risk transactions and authenticate repeat customers.

Data collected by BioCatch to create a behavioural profile includes how a user holds and touches their mobile device, how they interact with a site or service and how they respond to hidden challenges.

This profile can then be used to authenticate visitors on their return to a site or app, by correlating their behaviour with their profile. It can also identify whether a user is exhibiting behaviours consistent to that of a fraudster and whether they are human and not a machine, essentially replacing the need for a Captcha solution, BioCatch says.

“Many ecommerce sites have a username and password for repeat customers and today the problem is that those passwords are being compromised,” Oren Kedem, vice president of product management at BioCatch, explained to NFC World+.

“So, they use other technologies today like transaction analysis and device analysis to figure out if a session is risky or not.

“The problem is that those technologies make too many false positives. Today, I can tell you that about 10% of transactions on the internet are considered high-risk in ecommerce. What we are offering those websites is a new technology to authenticate many of those sessions, because we can authenticate about 80% of the sessions today in an ecommerce environment.

“So, if the website has a 10% high-risk transaction rate, after they use our technology it would reduce to only 2%.

“The Javascript is downloaded with the application to the browser of the user and, once it is there, it operates independently of the website, collects information and sends it to the cloud-based server. It only takes hours to do the integration so it is very straightforward. We do provide an API which is the backend solution to connect our service to the ecommerce site so we can provide the scores.

“Websites will also be able to use this solution to improve the customer experience and this is how we see ecommerce sites really using it. It is all about user experience and conversion rates for them.

“It is now being used by many banks. We are not installed in any ecommerce sites at the moment; we do however have several that are looking at it. We didn’t pursue the ecommerce market initially but we received some requests and we realised we need to address this market.”