Meet Georgia Steele-Matthews: a cybersecurity expert with a proven track record of leading seed investment rounds, negotiating contracts with blue chip companies such as KPMG and Fujitsu, and international speaking on fintech.
Cybersecurity continues to be top of mind across the financial services landscape. Banks are evaluating options to enhance or replace the password model as they are aware this is an insufficient means to ensure secure logins. Humans struggle to remember passwords that must have one capital letter, one number, and a special character --which is where biometrics come into play. Biometrics are widely used across the sector as they are immutable and harder for hackers to access. However, even the current use cases for biometrics have their flaws as anything stored in a database can be found, and fingerprints and even faces are not infallible. For one thing, facial recognition has suffered from justified accusations of racism.
Georgia’s has deep experience looking at challenges with passwords and biometrics. Her experience as Chief Product Officer of PixelPin is a prime example. PixelPin is pioneering a new way of authentication by using pictures instead of passwords. With a founding team out of the defense industry and investment from SoftBank’s SBI AI & Blockchain Fund, PixelPin has identified a problem that is directly applicable in financial services. Banks, which are always the favorite target of hackers for obvious reasons, must remain on the cutting edge of cybersecurity in an attempt to stay a step ahead of bad actors. Bank customers, weary of remembering password after password, and reading about breaches of sensitive data despite their best efforts at password security, are also anxious to find a better way.
