Keyless has won the Best of Show award at FinovateEurope 2025 for our latest product demo that shows how users can sign up, make a payment, and recover their account using only facial biometrics.

Finovate conferences showcase the most innovative banking and financial technology solutions shaping the future of the industries. During the conference, solution providers are invited to demo their products, with attendees voting for the most compelling and transformative technologies. 

Our Product Director Tobin Broadfoot gave the demo, winning the Best of Show award for Keyless. This award recognizes how strong multi-factor biometric authentication can transform banking systems without compromising simplicity or privacy.

The demo followed three key steps:

Tobin began by enrolling on a device using his face. This can be done in seconds, instantly prove two authentication factors - a user’s face and their device - with a single glance. Proving two authentication factors is known as genuine identity assurance and effectively confirms that the user authenticating is the same person that the user that enrolled.

Keyless enrollment also protects user privacy - a user’s biometric data is not stored anywhere - not on the device or the cloud.

Unlike Face ID, which locks a user into a single operating system, a user can enroll with Keyless through their banking app on an iPhone, and authenticate on an Android.

Losing a phone can turn into a nightmare for users and a huge cost for businesses. Currently, banks rely on support centers / help desks, which are costly to maintain, SMS OTPs / text messages, which are easy to phish and therefore targeted by bad actors.

Instead, Tobin recovered his account in seconds on a new device by showing his face to the camera. Behind the scenes, his face was compared to the original face he presented when he enrolled.

While he had to use two devices with the same operating systems due to Finovate’s AV specifications, Tobin could have used an Android for enrollment and an iPhone for authentication.

In the final part, Tobin demonstrated how Keyless can protect payments and high-value transactions.

He attempted to send a large amount of money from one device to another, which again triggered an authentication attempt. 

As with account recovery, banks tend to protect payments with an SMS OTP or a local biometric check such as FaceID. 

While FaceID is convenient, many banks have no way of verifying the the original face behind the FaceID has been changed. And those that do often protect this change with an SMS OTP check, rendering it ineffective and insecure.

Payments are also required to meet PSD2 and PSD3 compliance, which mandate the use of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Keyless authenticates a user’s device and face simultaneously, meeting this compliance requirement.

At the end of the session, Tobin summarized why Keyless is redefining authentication for financial institutions:

Security - Unlike passwords, SMS one-time passwords, or even Face ID, Keyless provides genuine identity assurance by authenticating two factors simultaneously, and uses passive liveness to make sure that the face infront of a camera is real and not a deepfake.

Convenience - By eliminating password resets and other manual processes, Keyless significantly reduces helpdesk costs, allowing businesses to scale authentication without increasing the support overhead. 

He adds that authentication also happens in under 300 milliseconds, making it faster than typing in a password or receiving a one-time password, which results in a frictionless experience that improves retention and satisfaction.

100% Privacy-Preserving - Keyless takes a fundamentally different approach to biometrics. Unlike traditional solutions that store sensitive data in centralized databases or on-device, Keyless never stores biometric data anywhere. This ensures full compliance with GDPR, PSD2, and upcoming PSD3 regulations, eliminating data breach risks.

Winning “Best of Show” at FinovateEurope is a proud moment for Keyless, reinforcing our mission to eliminate passwords, stop fraud, and revolutionize authentication with privacy-preserving biometrics.