Fast load times are a given. Now, users desire faster authentication.

You’ve got Mail! Once upon a time, in the America Online years when The Internet Superhighway slowly began to approach Autobahn speeds (you know, 50kb/s), page loading was a big deal. Even into the late aughts, phlegmatic page load times crippled websites. Tech companies and agencies would advertise “More responsive websites make more money” and “You’re losing customers with your page load times.” Website speed was a competitive advantage.

Fast-forward to 2022, and broadband internet in the US is the norm. Dial-up connections are as common as phone books. Page loading times are still important, but not nearly the nuisance they once were. Besides, as of August 2022, the majority of web visits skewed mobile (54% versus desktop’s 46%), and last year 90% of those mobile visits were on apps, not websites. 5G will only tip the scales further.

What does this mean? Simple: it’s time to prioritize user login and authentication. With website page loads no longer a slog, and more users glued to their mobile devices, expediting these processes will ultimately impact retention, conversions, and the user experience at large.

Turbocharging login (and account creation)

Few things grind a user’s gears like login trouble. The chagrin (and potential for churn) is multiplied exponentially if said user is trying to buy popular concert tickets, capitalize on a time-sensitive online sale, or locate an important email.

A major user experience detractor that strikes at the login stage is multi-factor authentication (MFA). The helicopter parenting of account verification, MFA’s added friction is not worth it when more efficient alternatives to preventing account takeover (ATO) are out there. MFA elongates the verification process and flags legitimate users in what is called a false positive challenge—a nightmare on UX Street.

MFA isn’t necessary when companies can identify trusted users via identity intelligence. This Trusted User Experience also unlocks the passwordless approach to login, which negates another customer pain point: password reset.

We’ve all endured the forgotten password song-and-dance, but this rundown from the Stytch blog illustrates just how painful and time consuming the process is:

Step 1: User forgets password.

Step 2: User clicks “Forgot password?” link.

Step 3: User enters email and requests password reset flow.

Step 4: User opens inbox and clicks the password reset link.

Step 5: User creates a new password with a set of 10 elaborate security requirements.

Step 6: User confirms new password.

Step 7: User is redirected to the original login page.

Step 8: User enters username and new, complicated password.

With logged-in session extensions for trusted users backed by continuous authentication, or a passwordless login approach, users won’t need to remember or create a complicated password they’ll likely forget and need to reset later. 

But remember, too, that passwordless login won’t mean squat-diddly if your account creation process is a mess. One QSR company told us that 10 percent of new app signups were lost because of incomplete email verification steps. Speeding up account creation by implementing progressive form-fill and streamlining verification steps is a must—they can’t login if they don’t exist!

Enabling Continuous Authentication

Once a user creates an account and logs in, a CXO’s job is to keep them logged in. Enabling continuous authentication for trusted users helps do just that, and prevent login issues that can lead to abandoned shopping carts, churn, and reputational harm. Amazon’s continuous authentication feature is perhaps the most well-known example. (Can you remember the last time Amazon asked you to login?)

Continuous authentication may give security teams the heebie-jeebies, but the same real-time identity intelligence that allows for passwordless login ensures that only real customers are let back in. Various real-time signals across the risk and trust spectrum determine if a customer warrants a session extension cookie and can be sent to checkout.

Companies that utilize Deduce’s continuous authentication enjoy an additional benefit: a user’s identity is alway secure, even when they are not actively using a given website or app. For example, If a user’s credentials are breached on another platform within our network—the Deduce Identity Network—that user’s session extension cookie is revoked and they’ll need to reauthenticate. The same logic applies to users who have authenticated elsewhere on our network.

For apps trying to facilitate the customer journey it all starts with identity, and continuous authentication, like its passwordless cousin, hinges on identifying genuine users—fast.

The common thread: identity intelligence

The entire turbocharged authentication machine—expedited account creation, passwordless login, continuous authentication—doesn’t work without identity intelligence. In the same way broadband internet disrupted the dial-up/page-loading conversation, real-time identity intelligence marks a true before-and-after moment in the annals of the user experience.

Joining the instantaneous authentication revolution requires real-time identity intelligence, yes, but companies also need dump trucks full of it. Garnering enough real-time identity intelligence to consistently identify a never-ending hoard of fraudsters and consumers—an amount of data rivaling the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.—seems daunting, if not blatantly unrealistic. With Deduce, however, companies can enjoy the same data-rich benefits of the tech behemoths.

Deduce’s Identity Network is the largest identity graph for fraud in the US. Companies who tap our network immediately gain all of the real-time data they need to preempt fraud, streamline account creation and login, and continuously authenticate users: 500M+ unique identity profiles, 150K+ websites and apps, and 1.4B daily interactions.

Given its positive impact on the user experience, we believe it’s high time for billboards and online ads to promote fast authentication—in the same way companies trumpeted their fast page load times all those years ago. And if their authentication isn’t fast to begin with, Deduce’s real-time identity intelligence can help with that.

Want to shift your account creation, login, and continuous authentication into hyperdrive? Contact us today.

A successful hype sale mustn’t harm the user experience

The aptly named “hype sale” is all the rage in today’s online landscape. The successor to the brick-and-mortar doorbuster, hype sales drive massive traffic and sell out exclusive physical and digital goods in record time.

NFTs. Concert tickets. Collectible cards. Companies can hype up practically anything. Sneakers—yes, that includes Crocs—move the needle like no other.

However, what’s moving that needle is where the problem lies. Footwear hype sales attract millions of bots, mostly scalper bots, that easily beat out the sneakerheads waiting torturously in the online queue. 

Ostensibly, e-commerce companies should be pleased. After all, isn’t the point to sell inventory? But, lost in the drummed-up excitement and revenue spike, is bots’ impact on the user experience (UX). In a bot-eat-bot world, can hype sales drive maximum profits without disappointing sneaker fans?

Bots are here to stay (and wreak havoc)

Between March 3, 2020 and January 2, 2021, scalper bots were responsible for almost 50% of shopping cart requests. The ubiquity of these bots can be tied to their accessibility: finding them is a cinch, and deployment doesn’t require black-hatter expertise.

Scalpers have a smorgasbord of bots at their disposal. Scalpers looking to flip sneakers for profit use “All In One” bots (AIO), such as Stellara or Dragon AIO. After procuring an AIO bot on either the dark web or Discord, sometimes for as much as $50K, scalpers can then buy sneakers from more than one website—faster and more intelligently than any single human could.

Scalpers covet bots, including the AIO variety, as much as the exclusive items themselves. Demand is so high, in fact, that sometimes they use a bot to buy a bot, and bots are flipped for thousands of dollars just like the products they help purchase. With the multibillion-dollar reseller market continuing to thrive—thanks in part to the pandemic’s influx of remote entrepreneurialism—the message is clear: bots are here to stay (and infuriate legitimate sneaker buyers).

Hype sale mayhem

If a glamorous new sneaker is up for grabs, bots are guaranteed to show up and wipe out the inventory. This can be brutal on an e-tailer’s server and web resources. Sophisticated bots can even grab sneakers from inventory management systems before they’re available for purchase.

It goes without saying that bot detection and mitigation is crucial. Aside from protecting the hopes and dreams of legitimate sneaker collectors, too many bots could crash a website or app altogether. But an all-out assault on bots isn’t the move: some bots are actually genuine customers trying to outmaneuver the bad bots.

Installing a bot mitigation solution, to separate the good bots from the bad, is a start. Yet, it still doesn’t do much to assuage those real customers who don’t have the luxury of a bot—those bot-less sneaker aficionados who lose out and then watch bot-assisted purchasers gloat on social media afterwards.

These customers are likely to churn, and they could drag a brand’s reputation through the dirt on their way out. If a company’s plan is to alleviate its bot problem—without damaging its brand image and UX—it might be time to focus on the humans.

Banking on trust

Maximizing hype sale profits while appeasing bot-less customers is, admittedly, a tough nut to crack. A blanket approach to neutralizing bots will also affect the good bots, and nets a less spectacular financial outcome. Meanwhile, a lax strategy that lets too many bots in might severely compromise UX and cause reputational harm.

We don’t have a silver-bullet solution to this problem (no one does), but we have an idea: focus on trust, not risk.

Assuming an e-tailer has a bot mitigation platform in place, it behooves the merchant to then verify the users in the waiting room and ensure the legitimate human customers are granted preferential treatment. This means moving them up the queue, ahead of bots, and drastically improving their chances of achieving sneakerhead nirvana.

This, of course, requires a stockpile of real-time identity intelligence that uses trust signals—geography, device ID, etc.—to seamlessly authenticate customers. Big shoes to fill. But Deduce is up for it.

Our Identity Network, the largest real-time identity graph for fraud in the US, spans more than 500 million unique user profiles and over 1.4 billion daily activities from 150,000+ websites and apps. If trust is indeed the key to balancing hype sale success with a seamless UX, there’s no better compliment to a bot mitigation solution.

Want to learn more about how Deduce prioritizes trust to facilitate the user experience? Contact us today.

Good news: Increased security and a seamless UX aren’t mutually exclusive

A recent payment intelligence report from Fraugster unearthed plenty of unsettling stats from the past year: online fraud accounted for about $80 billion in losses; false positives negated $14 billion worth of legitimate transactions; and gaming fraud increased by an all-time high of 32%.

However, the most sobering takeaway from the report might be the ongoing surge of identity fraud and its various forms. A nefarious hydra of account takeover (ATO), credential stuffing, and synthetic identity fraud—which saw a 109% increase—is outwitting cybersecurity defenses left and right.

This is a head-scratcher for B2C companies, specifically CXOs, CMOs, CISOs and their security teams. Users are more wary of fraud than ever, yet 85 percent of them dislike companies with identity verification issues. How do you bolster fraud prevention efforts without compromising the user experience (UX)?

Rest assured, we are doom-slayers, not doomsayers. Below, we’ll dive a bit deeper into ATO, credential stuffing, and synthetic identity fraud, then show you how top-notch fraud prevention and seamless UX can indeed play on the same team.

Synthetic identity fraud (+109%)

Considering synthetic identity fraud is firmly on the Federal Reserve’s radar, its 109% YoY increase makes sense. Only two years ago, in 2020, synthetic identity fraud cost financial institutions $20 billion.

Synthetic identity fraud occurs when bad actors combine legitimate emails, phone numbers, and other personal info from disparate identities to create a bogus “Frankenstein identity” capable of circumventing customer verification. Parents of newborns with recently minted social security numbers should be extra vigilant because those fresh SSNs are a gold mine for fraudsters. 

The most frustrating aspect of synthetic identity fraud is its elusiveness: identifying the Dr. Frankenstein behind a Frankenstein identity is incredibly difficult. Synthetic fraudsters are also more patient, often taking out smaller loans and paying bills on time to remain incognito.

Account takeover (+52%)

Account takeover, when fraudsters use stolen customer credentials to hijack an account and purchase goods, jumped 52% from last year. This is due in part to an uptick in card-not-present (CNP) transactions, e.g., transactions made online or over the phone that don’t make use of the EMV chip present in debit and credit cards.

Once an account is taken over, the possibilities are endlessly disastrous. In 2021, the three most likely post-ATO activities were making fraudulent purchases; extracting money from person-to-person apps, such as PayPal or Venmo; and editing account info in case a future transaction prompted a verification request. Another unhappy result of ATO, loyalty point theft, is on the rise, mainly due to the downturn in travel and leisure during COVID-19. 

It goes without saying that account takeover victims—and customer support teams—don’t look back on the experience with glee. According to Javelin Research, ATO attacks can cost customers more than $290. Customers also spend 15+ hours undoing the wreckage.

Credential stuffing (+45%)

Credential stuffing, an identity fraud tactic that’s essentially a malicious game of trial-and-error, grew 45% from the previous year. With the final quarter of 2022 closing in fast, B2C businesses and their users must be on guard as credential stuffing attacks rise 10x amid the holiday shopping fracas.

Similar to account takeover and synthetic identity fraud, the credentials that aid these attacks often derive from security breaches. Leaked usernames, passwords, social security numbers and the like get peddled on the dark web for as much as $15K and as little as a few dollars. Per IBM, around 30,000 account credentials were sold on the dark web in 2021—in some cases, sellers even offer 1-2 week refunds if buyers can’t access the promised account.

Have your cake, eat your cake

For those keeping score at home, synthetic identity fraud, account takeover, and credential stuffing attacks: not fun. But they aren’t invulnerable either, and, even better, you can wipe them out while still maintaining a frictionless UX.

The trick to stopping this troika of identity fraud is neutralizing the perps before they can strike. This, of course, requires a hefty chunk of real-time identity intelligence, which in turn unlocks a Trusted User Experience—the perfect balance of airtight security and a seamless customer journey. The Trusted User Experience also encompasses continuous authentication. Akin to shopping on Amazon, continuously verified users aren’t bombarded with authentication challenges that lead to abandoned shopping carts and potentially churn. If a user’s identity operates within its usual parameters, they won’t need to log in upon revisiting a site or app.

On the security side, real-time identity intelligence preempts identity fraudsters who have access to behemoth data sets. The average fraud prevention solution—tools that depend on static, historical data alone (names, emails, physical addresses, SSNs)—can’t compete with these bad actors, as most of this data is already up for grabs on the dark web. If businesses want to protect their finances and reputations, a massive stockpile of real-time, dynamic data (user activity, IP address, device, geography, etc.) and the resulting risk and trust signals is the way.

Thanks to the Deduce Identity Network and its MAMAA-like hoard of dynamic, real-time identity intelligence, creating a secure yet seamless UX is easier done than said.

Our Identity Network is the largest real-time identity graph for fraud in the US. It gathers more than 500 million unique user profiles and over 1.4 billion daily activities from 150,000+ websites and apps. This data continues to grow by the minute, delivering a Trusted User Experience that preemptively recognizes legitimate users and bad actors in equal measure.

Want to have your Trusted User Experience cake and eat it, too? Contact us today and get started in just a few hours.

Continuous authentication is no longer exclusive to big tech

Amazon’s Prime Day was last week, the annual free-for-all in which Prime subscribers jostle for exclusive deals. Amazon’s hefty stockpile of data (and identity intelligence) enables shoppers to jump on and off the site or app without having to reauthenticate, boosting their chances of snagging their favorite moisturizer or air fryer.

Thankfully, for companies not in the FAANG Gang, Deduce’s real-time identity intelligence provides the same convenience. This “continuous authentication” feature, which keeps trusted users logged in for 30 days (or longer—this is SecOps configurable), can now create a frictionless customer journey for all B2C companies, even if their CEO doesn’t moonlight as an astronaut. Implementation is just as seamless—without sacrificing security.

Here is why continuous authentication, and frictionless real-time digital identity verification, are central to the consumer journey, what this looks like in action, and how Deduce makes it happen.

It all starts with identity

All consumer journeys start with identity. Verifying users instantly without having them enter their username and password upon each visit goes a long way in facilitating these journeys.

Per a FIDO Alliance report, more than 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned by existing customers due to false positive challenges. Today’s customer is busy, impatient, and short on attention span. They aren’t too thrilled about logging back in for checkout or using a valid credit card and seeing the transaction wrongly declined. Companies feel the hurt of false positives, too. Every triggered multi-factor authentication (MFA) represents a costly trifacta for businesses: lost revenue, reputational damage, and churn, which potentially impacts lifetime customer value.

Delivering a smooth user experience hinges on correctly identifying legitimate customers, instantaneously. Implementing continuous authentication throughout a user’s session keeps them engaged and decreases the likelihood of cart abandonment and/or churn.

The nitty-gritty

So, how does continuous authentication actually work?

We’ve all seen the “Remember Me” box underneath login forms. Depending on the app, ticking this box activates one of two implementations: users only need to enter their password moving forward; or, most conveniently, they’ll bypass login entirely for a period of time.

Continuous authentication, including passwordless login, gives security teams the chills, but Deduce’s behavioral intelligence and real-time risk and trust signals make sure that only legitimate customers, not bad actors, are granted this privilege. After an identity is verified via risk and trust signals across network, device, geography, and activity, a customer can be issued a session extension cookie. Essentially a security token, this extension tells the authentication solution that a user is trustworthy and can be fast-tracked to check-out.

The best part about Deduce’s continuous authentication is that a user’s identity is secure even when they are not using a company’s website. If a user’s credentials are compromised on another site or app within the Deduce Identity Network, their session extension is revoked and they must reauthenticate upon return. Conversely, if the user has authenticated elsewhere on the Deduce Identity Network, that authentication is applied to their identity in real-time and they won’t need to authenticate again on other sites.

Without the required amount of data, however—on par with the likes of Amazon and Google and Apple—continuous authentication and 30+ day session extensions aren’t possible. Unless…

Not your average data stack

Don’t let data limitations get in the way of your continuously authenticated dreams. Deduce’s augmentative solution, fueled by the largest identity graph in the US, layers on top of a company’s existing data stack and effectively levels the playing field.

The Deduce Identity Network packs the identity intelligence needed to pull off continuous authentication and prevent false positive MFA challenges while neutralizing fraudsters, regardless of a company’s size. This network comprises 500M+ unique identity profiles that generate more than 1.4B daily interactions, meaning that Deduce sees the majority of the U.S. population transact in real-time, multiple times per week. As risk data evolves, our identity-backed, machine learning-driven, real-time behavioral intelligence adjusts accordingly.

Legacy identity fraud prevention solutions dependent on static data (name, address, mother’s maiden name, etc.) are no match for today’s fraudsters, and certainly can’t be trusted to power extended login sessions. Static data is more likely to have been compromised by major data breaches and trafficked to cybercriminals on the dark web. Legacy solutions also install their software on websites and apps using JavaScript, far less efficient than Deduce’s no-code integration that integrates within seconds.

With Deduce’s real-time digital identity verification, users bypass manual login for extended periods and enjoy an equally swift account creation process. Businesses and their UX teams, meanwhile, can create a frictionless consumer journey that doesn’t skimp on security, a Trusted User Experience that keeps customers coming back for more.