A new research report from Juniper breaks down what its analysts view as the top disruptors in the financial technical services, or FinTech, space.

“Digital commerce is now over two decades old; Amazon was launched in 1994,” Juniper notes in a whitepaper.

“However, this ‘new’ channel for shopping is nowhere near fully-formed, quite the opposite in fact. A collection of emergent technologies is combining to take digital commerce in fresh and exciting directions.”

The top three, based on what Juniper views as “their anticipated impact.” Here are highlights from the whitepaper:

  • Biometrics

“Consumers are already making use of biometric authentication to drastically speed up mobile web and app transactions. Clearly the difference between pressing a fingerprint and filling out a lengthy payment form on a small screen is marked. It makes a material difference to both shoppers and merchants. So biometric authentication is having a positive impact on digital commerce.

“Of course, there are caveats. It is possible, for example, to create a fake fingerprint from rubber, but how worthwhile is the effort required to spoof just one device? …

“This is why biometrics are commonly used in association with tokenization, which assigns a randomized token to the raw data. In this scenario, only the token is sent OTA (Over The Air).”

  • Federated Identity

“When a merchant can correctly identify a customer, it eradicates the big problems that plague digital commerce; theft, fraud and sabotage. It also helps retailers to market and personalize their services, but consumers hate registration form-filling. This is why third parties, who hold personal information, now offer a shortcut sign-in.

“These partners include banks, government, mobile operators, social networks and big tech firms like Apple and Google. Federated identity is well-established and offers a good consumer experience. However, it is not ‘done’. Some merchants have competitive issues with the dominant provider Facebook and are also aware that newer providers can promise stronger authentication in their systems. Apple can link its ID to a fingerprint; mobile operators to the location of their devices, for example.

“These qualities make identification faster and more reliable.”

  • Tokenisation

“Digital commerce relies on ‘card not present’ transactions. This leads to merchants storing payment credentials on their systems and those same credentials traveling OTA from consumer to retailer. As many high profile cases have shown, criminals habitually steal this data. Tokenization has emerged as the key technology for combating this.

“Tokenization does not try to make data harder to steal, it makes it harder to use. It replaces card details with a unique token that is linked to the account, but in itself is worthless.

“The technology is already in use; Apple implemented it for Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay use it. Tokenization has also been endorsed by the newer mobile payments processors like Stripe and Braintree, who power apps like Uber.”

For more information about the report and how to purchase it, see:

https://www.juniperresearch.com/researchstore/commerce-money/disruptive-technologies/top-10-disruptive-technologies-in-fintech-2016?utm_source=junipereshots&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Disruptive_Tech16eShot1