The FIDO Alliance, an up-and-coming industry consortium aimed at simplifying online identity and doing away with passwords added IPO darling Alibaba to its Board of Directors, according to a statement on Tuesday.
The FIDO (or “Fast IDentity Online”) Alliance announced that Alibaba Group’s payments business, Alipay will be among the first to deploy FIDO technology for secure payments authentication. On September 17, the company announced that it will use Nok Nok Labs’ FIDO-compliant NNL™ S3 Authentication Suite to enable secure online payments via the Fingerprint Sensor (FPS) technology on the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Alipay customers will be able to make payments and transfers using Alipay’s mobile application, Alipay Wallet by applying their fingerprint to the Galxy’s fingerprint sensor.
“We look forward to participating on the FIDO Alliance board, and assuring that commerce and authentication are uniquely cooperative and seamlessly compatible,” said Ni Liang, Alibaba group, senior director, department of security, in a statement.
Mobile payments is gaining traction, with Apple recently joining the fray with an NFC based mobile payment feature, Apple Pay. The FIDO Alliance is developing technical specifications for open standards for doing strong authentication without a reliance on passwords.
Alibaba joins tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Samsung and ARM as FIDO board members, as well as banking and payments firms like Bank of America, Visa and Mastercard.
Read more via FIDO Alliance.
