How Silent Authentication Reduces Fraud and Cart Abandonment

How would your business prospects for the year ahead look if you could increase your overall revenue by 300-400% overnight?

It’s a fantasy number, isn’t it. The sort of insane increase that doesn’t bear serious consideration. But in fact that number is a pretty realistic estimate of what would happen to the fortunes of the average online business if it were able to find a way to convert the number of customers who abandon a purchase halfway through into solid sales.

Because credible statistics show time and time again that the rates of so-called ‘shopping cart abandonment’ massively outweigh the number of actual online sales. A recent US study found the abandonment rate was over 70%, while a similar UK poll found it was as high as 80%.

So, what causes all these trolleys to be ditched before they get to checkout? Well, the single biggest cause is usually said to be the addition of extra costs like delivery charges that make a customer rethink. But just behind that as an explanatory cause, you will usually find the category broadly defined as ‘too much hassle’. This can encompass anything from annoyance at having to register and verify to proceed, a long-projected delivery time wait to concerns over the company’s trustworthiness with card details.

The wonder that is silent authentication.

And while things like delivery charges are outside our remit to help, I have some very good news that will fix a number of those ‘hassle’ components at a stroke. I am speaking of the up and coming wonder that is silent authentication.

This is set to be the big online commerce tech trend of the next couple of years at least. And that’s because it does something that until very recently meant a contradiction: it makes transactions both more secure and easier. It does this by ridding us of the infuriating pain of One Time Passwords (OTPs) – and replacing them with a frictionless security check that requires the user to do precisely nothing.

Frictionless user authentication is finally here

Yet it provides better security than OTPs ever could. And not only that but it’s quicker too.

So how does it work? How can we protect customers, accounts, and transactions without requiring them to wait for a OTP or leave your app at all?

Well essentially it authenticates the user via the mobile device they are using – a live mobile operator check is able to verify that the mobile phone used by a customer is the same one that you expect it to be, confirming a legitimate connection between the device itself, the account that holds it and the customers’ details on your app or website. This obviates the OTP process completely which in turn means users don’t need to leave the page to check an SMS or similar. In fact it requires zero input from the customer at all, and speeds up their experience – meaning they are significantly more likely to stay on the site until they are onboarded to your service, or sold to, or both. It all happens so fast they won’t even be aware of it as a delay.

So this is one of those innovations that should pay for itself many times over – converting many of those hitherto abandoned trolleys into sales.

TMT Analysis’ silent authentication offering provides a single interface to over 50 network operators around the world, meaning you only need to integrate the service into your workflow once. Simply, we’ve called it TMT Authenticate.

And I couldn’t be more excited.