Passwords are broken, so why don’t banks do something about it?

Oh wait, they are.

A recent report by Celent indicates that 38% of banks with $100 billion or more in assets — there are 21 of them in the U.S. — offer fingerprint authentication. The most famous form of fingerprint authentication is Apple’s Touch ID.

In all, 608 banks offer fingerprint authentication, or 9.5% of the financial institutions that offer mobile banking. Last October, that number was 252, or about 4% of banks offering mobile.

The news comes at a welcome time. A recent survey of 200 IT security professionals indicated 77% of them believe passwords “are becoming ineffective” in securing their IT environments. And passwords, as is widely known, are hackable, usually because they are poorly chosen. Of the 200 experts surveyed, 53% say their organizations’ passwords are vulnerable to hackers.

There’s another upside to biometrics. Celent noted a “feature lift” from fingerprint authentication:

Banks whose customers have installed fingerprint authentication have an uplift of 53% in enrolled customers per deposit account relative to banks who don’t offer it. While this is correlation, not causality, it shows that the banks [that] offer this feature have more customers enrolled in mobile banking than those [that] don’t.

Celent also announced a partnership with FI Navigator, which helped it compile this data, in order “to analyze the mobile banking market in an unprecedented depth of detail.”