Continuous Authentication Capability Protects Online and Mobile Banking Customers While Maintaining a Seamless and Frictionless User Experience

London, UK – November 16, 2016 – BioCatch, the global leader in behavioural biometrics announced today the successful trial of its technology at NatWest. NatWest is one of the largest banks in the UK and serves 14 million customers. The BioCatch technology has been deployed at the Bank since the start of 2016 within Coutts and with some business customers and continues to successfully prevent online fraud attempts, helping to protect customers. The next step of the plan is to pilot the technology with NatWest personal banking customers later in 2017.

BioCatch’s system captures more than 500 points of behaviour such as hand-eye coordination, pressure, hand tremors, navigation, scrolling and other finger movements amongst other things to create a unique user profile. Via continuous authentication, it is also able to recognise anomalies in behaviours from the point of login and throughout the entire session. This allows BioCatch to distinguish the normal human behaviour of an authorised user from that of an unauthorised user, as well as to recognise automated BOTs, RATS, malware and other malicious account takeover attacks, where the victim is typically unaware that their banking session has been hacked.

Simon McNamara, Chief Administrative Officer of NatWest said, “The technology that we’ve been able to deploy with the help of BioCatch has played a crucial role in strengthening our security systems. The breadth of behavioural biometrics that BioCatch technology can monitor is really impressive and we’ve already seen many examples of it alerting us to suspicious activity and protecting our customers from fraud.”

Saving the bank material losses in the last few months alone, the system was able to:
- Stop fraudulent attempts to transfer funds 
- Identify remote access Trojans during an online session 
- Identify fraud attempts occurring across multiple channels (i.e online and mobile)

Eyal Goldwerger, BioCatch CEO said, “With 48 percent of data security breaches across the financial services industry involving compromised web applications, the importance of validating a user not only at login but throughout a session as a way to prevent fraud, has taken on increasing urgency. At the same time, today’s leading banks, such as NatWest, are also extremely mindful that injecting additional security measures must be balanced with maintaining a seamless customer experience, whether online or mobile.”