Daon: Creating convenient security measures with biometrics

The line between convenience and security is a tightrope to walk – but Irish-rooted company Daon is helping businesses worldwide maintain that balance with ease. Founded in 1999, Daon has long since established itself as a leading pioneer of the identity biometrics revolution. Supported by Enterprise Ireland, the company empowers international businesses across a range of industries with secure, passwordless authentication.

“We envision the future of the financial industry as having passwordless authentication,” says Robert Long, President of Americas at Daon. “Where all of the hundreds of pieces of access information you currently use today merge into a single, secure method of authentication. It’s ‘you’ that will be the password going forward – regardless of the access point.” 

This is what Daon calls ‘identity continuity’ – it’s a higher level of credential attestation, creating an enrollment process or ‘identity proofing process’ that allows you to easily prove who you are further down the road and in cross-channel experiences. This methodology marries the concepts of identity security and end-user experience and brings that together in a platform approach – enabling businesses to provide a frictionless sign-in or authentication process for customers while resting assured that their data is secure.

“If I can’t remember what my login credentials are, I’m not confined to a username and password. My login credentials are made up of the things that make me “me” – such as facial, voice, or behavioral recognition.”

Secure digital banking requires biometrics

When it comes to the banking industry and financial institutions, there are many different problems that Daon solves – but generally, they revolve around security, trust, and fraud.

“Fraud is probably the biggest issue we’re seeing in this sector. To date, financial institutions have needed security to be somewhat frictional to deter fraudsters. But these legacy architectures and credential methodologies are going away and we want to get businesses ready for identity continuity and passwordless experiences”.

As more and more banking customers move online, better security approaches are needed to balance convenience and safety. Daon believes that biometrics—technology driven recognition of unique physical characteristics like face or voice—are the answer. But their technology doesn’t just solve long-standing issues such as fraud and trust. During the pandemic, Daon demonstrated how businesses can use it to quickly adapt to unprecedented circumstances.

“The pandemic raised a new challenge for banks everywhere – what happens when your customers can no longer visit your physical branches? Our technology allowed businesses to overcome this quickly so customers could be validated over the phone or the web, with facial recognition in addition to an ID,” added George Skaff, Senior Vice President of WW Marketing at Daon.

And it’s problem-solving like this that has allowed them to grow an impressive portfolio of clients globally.

The next step for financial institutions everywhere

With clients on six different continents and more than 1 billion identities verified, Daon’s seamless verification processes have already transformed the private and public sectors, helping international organizations in an array of industries grow their identity continuity story.

“The platform is flexible enough to accommodate the different standards and regulations set out by each state or country while also allowing identity continuity to occur.”

As a response to emerging requests from customers to move to cloud-native solutions, Daon is launching a new SaaS-based platform called TrustX™. This new offering complements its existing IdentityX® platform which supports on-premise and private cloud deployments.

Daon also works with a variety of global partners to take its product to market. Recently ForgeRock named Daon CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) Partner of the Year for providing their customers with a friction-free digital onboarding experience with more secure authentication. They’ve also worked with other partners in tech including DXC, Ping Identity, Jack Henry Associates, Avtex, and TTEC. But it’s within financial institutions and core banking systems where Daon has really found its stride.

“In the credit union space, CU*Answers has 300 credit unions with us today leveraging our software – and we’re continuing to explore that vertical of core banking system integrations because that’s where the continuity story really works. Once you’re in, you’re in and you can use your authentication for the branch, mobile contact centre, loans, new accounts, and all those kinds of things at once. So we’ve been able to solve those kinds of use cases and the broader international success of that has really been tremendous”, added Long.

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