André Ferraz is the CEO and co-founder of Incognia, a location identity company, with teams in the U.S. and Brazil, that provides mobile authentication to banks, fintech and mobile commerce. André is an expert on location technology and a strong advocate for user privacy. Originally from Brazil, André founded his first company while a university student in computer science. Today the location technology developed by André and his co-founders has been deployed on more than 100M smartphones.
As financial fraud continues to climb, experts say that this year will force the industry to change its approach on many security fronts, especially authentication.
Any authentication factor that relies on the user inputting personal information is more vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Authentication factors such as passwords, biometrics and SMS-based one-time passwords are highly vulnerable. For instance, according to Incognia's FinTech mobile report, 17 of the top 20 finance applications in the U.S. rely on SMS as the secondary authentication factor and many still rely on passwords as the primary authentication factor. Therefore, companies need to adopt technologies that enable them to proactively detect fraud instead of depending on the end user's action, given that most people are not cybersecurity experts.