Israeli startup Transmit Security, which is developing programmable biometric authentication has come out of stealth and announced a $40 million self-funded round of financing. Based in Boston and Tel Aviv, the company has unveiled a platform that will disrupt the $10 billion authentication software market. The technology enables organizations to displace passwords and implement any form of identity verification, on any device, across all their customer/partner facing channels.
The company is being financed by its founders, CEO Mickey Boodaei and president Rakesh K. Loonkar, who previously created online banking security pioneer Trusteer, which was acquired by IBM in 2013. Boodaei also cofounded Imperva, a billion dollar provider of cyber and data security products. The company’s research and development team is made up of former members of Unit 8200, the elite Israeli Intelligence Corps.
The Transmit Security Platform (SP) uses mobile devices as the primary delivery mechanism to add any form of primary or secondary identity verification (facial/selfie, eye, touch ID and fingerprint, voice biometrics, SMS, etc.) to any application (web, mobile, call center, point of sale, ATMs, etc.). Once deployed, an enterprise can make changes to all their authentication methods and identity risk flows without any code changes to their applications.
Boodaei said, “After working with more than 400 of the world’s largest financial institutions, we identified authentication as the next major hurdle they, and other industries, face from a security, fraud prevention, regulatory and customer experience perspective. By decoupling authentication and anti-fraud from the application, we’ve built a platform that allows any form of identity verification, as well as anti-fraud measures, to be instantly delivered on any web, mobile, branch, call center, or other application. The benefit of our approach is that customers can execute on unique and complex projects in a matter of minutes or hours.”
To eliminate the need to embed authenticators into each application, Transmit SP uses a simple interface to offload all authentication and provisioning tasks. It provides a wide set of built-in authentication methods that enable organizations to mix-and-match any combination of facial, eye, voice, fingerprint recognition, one time passwords (OTP), push notifications, pattern drawing, Device ID, and other 3rd party or internally developed authenticators.
Once an application is connected to Transmit SP, any of the authenticators and any authentication process can be changed, added or removed without any software development. Transmit SP also supports any existing third-party authentication or anti-fraud products in use, and can orchestrate real-time responses based on customer configured policies.
Loonkar said, “Today, most enterprises are hard-coding authentication, anti-fraud logic and complex exceptions directly into each application, which prevents them from being able to quickly deploy new identity flows and use cases. Since our platform unifies authentication, and fraud prevention in a new architecture, it allows customers to change identity tools and flows without code updates to their applications, for faster time to market for new features and innovations. We can demonstrate how customers can execute on complex identity projects, and thousands of use cases, in literally minutes.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 12, 2017
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