18 February 2015

Would you use Touch ID for your mobile banking?

You will likely have seem the news that RBS and Nat West are planning to use Apple's Touch ID. On the face of it would seem to make perfect sense to make use of this latest innovation in smartphone technology, however in my opinion Touch ID for banking is not a good idea. 

Firstly, when this technology was launched it was hacked within days and with relative ease, and that was not a big surprise. After all, it simply isn’t commercially viable to place high-quality biometrics technology on a mass-market consumer device costing a few hundred pounds.

I myself am an iPhone user and stopped using Touch ID when I challenged a friend over dinner to get access to my device. It wasn’t until I got home later in the evening that I realised he had succeeded in changing some of my settings.

We do need to move away from passwords and what they are replaced with must strike a balance between delivering security and usability if they are going to become ubiquitous. For me whilst this latest news from RBS and Nat West is great headlines grabber but is ultimately they latest gimmick on the biometrics bandwagon.