In a post last week, we revisited the issue of passwords and their suitability in serving as a secure authentication method for consumers to gain access to websites and applications. Payment security professionals generally agree that most consumers do not voluntarily adopt strong security practices in selecting and managing their passwords. Consumers often select easily guessed passwords and even use the same password across numerous websites. Given these tendencies, the payments industry is looking for alternative authentication methods that either consumers could adopt or the industry could perform covertly—methods that would ultimately provide for a higher level of customer authentication.

The Aite Group conducted a research study in January 2017 to understand consumer knowledge of and attitudes regarding other authentication methodologies. In particular, the study looked at responses at the generational level, with the respondent base broken into four age segments:

  • Seniors: 70+ years of age
  • Baby boomers: 53–70 years of age
  • Gen X: 37–52 years of age
  • Millennials (Gen Y): 16–36 years of age

The study revealed a universal attitude that passwords are easy to use. Only 7 percent of the seniors indicated they are difficult to use, compared to 1 percent or less for the other three groups. Millennials use the same passwords the most, with 39 percent indicating they use only one or two different passwords and more than three-fourths (77 percent) using five or fewer passwords among all their online accounts.

The participants were asked to rank the importance of different attributes in their consideration for using their financial institution's online banking service. All the age groups indicated that ease of use is topmost. While a majority within each group also cited strong security and fraud prevention as important, seniors especially indicated its importance, giving it equal weight to ease of use.

Although the majority of the respondents in each of the groups indicated some level of willingness to change their authentication method to access their bank account, as the chart show, there was a clear relationship between their age and level of willingness (see the chart).

Chart-one

So what authentication method did the segments favor? Go read the full report or wait until our next post, which will also discuss whether it will be necessary to offer consumers incentives to get them to change their habits.

Photo of David Lott By David Lott, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed