The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida deployed a solution that enables officers to capture and search fingerprints against state and national FBI databases from any location; Gemalto is providing multi-factor authentication to MOHELA, one of the largest student loan servicers in the U.S.; Authentify announced its xFA SecureCallCenter to help financial institutions fight fraud; ZTE announced that a flagship device will be launched with a eye-based biometric solution from EyeVerify; IDenticard announced the release of UBand Prox.

Qualcomm Technologies Inc. launched a 3D fingerprint authentication technology based on ultrasonic technology; HID Global has partnered with Samsung to provide enterprises with physical access tool; ASSA ABLOY announced that it will license its Seos platform for mobile credentials; Gallagher released some news products that enable businesses of all sizes to go mobile; AGNITiO and Nok Nok Labs announced the availability of FIDO Ready products.

Using geo-location from a mobile device to make sure that an individual is in the same location of a payment or authentication request is one of the core tenants of an adaptive authentication system and FinSphere is now bringing this to payments world.

Microsoft Corp. wants to shift the focus of computing to the mobile and cloud. The company wants to seize the opportunity to hook up with all those Internet-connected devices. Key to this vision, Microsoft is turning to the cloud to provide consumers with more identity authentication options and help organizations embrace a bring-your–own-device (BYOD) policy.

There is a change on the horizon in identity management? Modern identity presents many new challenges – particularly with user authentication. Two new technologies are here to stay to help address the new challenges – adaptive and mobile biometric authentication.

Despite high profile data breaches at companies, including Target and Sony, consumer behavior toward protecting personal identifiable information has not changed significantly. A substitute for password or PIN-based authentication must be at least as simple, if not much simpler, than current methods of authentication. People want better security, but the way we will get there is through convenience.

Mobile apps provide an opportunity for financial service providers to create a foundation for security and convenience. To capitalize on this, institutions need to ensure that they are making the most of the device capabilities by enabling strong, cryptographic, device-based authentication. The goal, however, is to hide the security complexity from the user to both increase compliance and eliminate authentication hassles.

The U.S. Department of Commerce last year announced three pilots in support of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). The $3 million in grants will be shared among the three recipients – MorphoTrust, Confyrm and GSMA – as they pilot solutions exploring mobile devices instead of passwords for online authentication, minimization of loss from ID theft and improved access to state services.

A bill passed by the Virginia General Assembly and is awaiting the governor’s signature will go a long way toward enabling Virginians to dump most of their passwords in favor of a single digital identity credential. The proposal would establish uniform standards for strengthening and authenticating digital identities.

The Florida lawmaker who pushed through a bill to ban the use of biometric data in Florida schools now wants to protect the digital assets of the deceased. Those assets include emails, text messages, online photographs, documents stored in the cloud, electronic bank statements, and social media accounts.