Password theft is an ongoing problem. Finger print and voice recognition is still years away. What's a bank to do if it wants to verify the thousands of customers using its mobile app? One way is their behavior -- or at least their typing behavior. Banks in Europe's Nordic region have begun rolling out a new kind of security technology for their mobile apps that tracks the pressure and speed of how customers type a pin number into their smartphones.

Security isn't an add-on; in today's world security precludes business. Neil Costigan is the CEO of BehavioSec, a behavioural biometrics company using continuous machine learning to authenticate users based on the way they type, swipe, and hold their devices. To illustrate the imperative call for security and the ingenuity of attackers, Costigan recounted a cautionary tale about a trading platform in Asia which sacrificed security at the client side to make way for user convenience. Creators felt that if they made it impossible to withdraw money from the app, instead requiring a manual step such as going into a physical branch where KYC and identity verification would be guaranteed, user data would never be compromised. However, fraudsters exploited the weak security and commandeered a number of accounts to make lots of small trades, eventually managing to manipulate the market by building consumer accounts that could then trade with the stolen profiles, - including hedges and quick buys - before enjoying the cash out.