Alternative Logins on Mobile Still Lag User ID & Password
The average internet user has 19 passwords, and one in three of them suck, according to security experts.
But it’s not our fault — remembering passwords is hard! An upper-case letter, a number, a special character… and yet we have to enter them again and again, even on tiny mobile screens.
Austin, Texas-based Malauzai Software, Inc. released its mobile banking usage data report today, and focused on the login process. The report examines trends in mobile and internet banking usage from Oct. 2015 through Feb. 2016 for over 350 banks and credit unions, spanning 7 million logins from more than 400,000 mobile and internet banking users.
For the five-month span covered in the report, iPhone users logged in about 17.4 times per month, while Android users logged in 18.65 times per month. On the tablet side, iPad users averaged 6.7 logins a month, and general online banking logins were 7.68 logins a month. The amount of time mobile users remain on their banking app is twice that of internet banking sessions. Users are likely less vigilant about logging out when their business is done since mobile devices are typically not shared.
Below is a table showing the methods used to look during the period:
| Login Method | Feature Use | Users |
| User ID / Password | 5,682,773 | 432,052 |
| PIN login | 749,288 | 40,679 |
| Touch ID & SmartText | 698,317 | 25,449 |
For a PIN login, users can create and enter a 4-digit PIN to login to their mobile apps. SmartText provides fast access to account balances and transaction history without having to manually enter one’s PIN or username/password combination.
Alternative forms of login, e.g. PIN, Touch ID, and SmartText, are growing in usage frequency, according to Malauzai, though datd for previous periods is not given. PIN logins comprise nearly 10.5% of the total logins per month, with Touch ID & SmartText closing the gap, behind by only 0.8%, at 9.7 percent of total logins.
Now the iPhone’s PIN-based login accounts for just one-third of that for Android users. But in terms of Touch ID and SmartText, iPhone users lead with 3.4 times more logins than Android users. This makes sense, since Android phones lack Touch ID, though many have their own forms fingerprint authentication.
It seems we still have a long way to go before the password is overthrown as the leader of login methods. Not every bank offers alternative methods, but the number that do can be expected to grow. We hope it happens quickly.
