EXCLUSIVE—Facial recognition and other forms of biometric authentication may not have their golden moment in 2018, as the recent iPhone news suggests, but that doesn’t mean identity is less of a problem for business, merchants, and payment providers.

“You need to encrypt the data when it comes to you, you need to provide tokenization when it’s at rest, and for identity, you make sure the merchant is using things like EMV or fraud detection solutions,” Chris Kronenthal, president and chief technology officer for FreedomPay, told Bank Innovation.

When it comes to payment security merchants will get semi-integrated solutions that will leave themselves vulnerable, Kronenthal added, which FreedomPay solves “by providing a fully integrated piece of technology, so we are directly integrated into their software, into their ecommerce, into their point of sale.”

As a solutions sale, FreedomPay seeks to “guide enterprise merchants” onto its platform so it “essentially becomes that fabric that ties everything together and provides that security,” Kronenthal said. Merchants on the FreedomPay platform number in the hundreds of thousands, though the company does not disclose the specific figure.

In terms of payment security, FreedomPay takes “a hybrid approach,” Kronenthal said. That approach has identity protection in its center, though the addition of other, more experimental forms of authentication (namely, biometrics or a blockchain) remain somewhat murky for the moment.

Like many in the space, FreedomPay is looking to implement some of the emerging methods of authentication, he said, adding that the company was having discussions around the technologies previously mentioned above. “We’re exploring, in the payments space, emerging authentication methods, whether or not that’s facial recognition, or your fingerprint, or two-factor authentication which historically exists for a lot of banking applications — all of those are topics or discussions for up in the air,” Kronenthal said.

While biometrics have been in the public space for some time, other methods of authentication might take longer to implement.

“We want to provide a solution that solves for multiple types of alternative currency or alternative payment methods, provides a consistent consumer experience, but also assures the merchant that they’re going to get the money that they’re going to get,” Kronenthal said of blockchain, noting — when asked if the company would build its own blockchain for the purpose, “There’s a lot of really great implementations of blockchain as a technological underpinning…there’s myriad use cases that are very interesting and will probably see the light of day soon when it comes to the payment ecosystem.”

To learn more about the latest developments in biometrics and identity authentication, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to request an invitation.