Barclays PIN Sentry and Nat West Card reader
(This post shows a picture of one of our products but still reflects my opinion rather than that of my company).
First off, want to congratulate Barclays and Natwest for introducing more security for their consumers.
The Barclays PINSentry device and the NatWest Card Reader have been shipped to over 1 million UK consumers.
I think the adoption of two factor authentication in the UK is a real step forwards to making consumers feel more secure when they online bank. It follows moves in other countries around Europe which have had a positive effect on reducing fraud.
(And here is the "but" you were probably waiting for....)
But....I can't say I like the implementation for the following reasons;
1) The card reader is bulky. I can't see many people wanting to carry it around during their work / personal life. (There are a number of sites where consumers are complaining about this, just Google "PINsentry")
2) The implementation only allows consumers to protect their online bank account. What about other online sites? Are consumers expected to carry around a token for every site they want to protect online? Will they end up with 7 or 8 tokens for each of their online relationships they value?
The debate goes back to a previous post I made about usability vs cost vs security. The card readers that have been implemented, I would humbly suggest, are security solutions which are not user friendly and as such some customers will continue to rebel against them.
I think we will see more and more consumer authentication implementations but they must be able to be shared across all aspects of a consumer's online life and be in a format that is acceptable to consumers.
I believe we will start to see banks and other organisations giving out more appropriate security devices like this one over time:
