Last week I tried to make a wire transfer. Simple enough, should have taken me two minutes. Needless to say, it didn’t. First, I pulled out my phone and logged into my banking app. It was easy – I entered my username and password once a few years ago and now I login by leveraging FaceID. It takes <1 second. I love it. Unfortunately, my bank’s mobile app doesn’t have great wire transfer functionality so I grabbed my computer to log in on desktop.
Here we go...
Recall that I entered my username and password once a few years ago on mobile. I rarely log in on my computer. I have no clue what my password is, but my phone still knows it’s me. I’m logged in on my phone. I’m sitting in front of my computer. There’s no way for my computer to recognize it’s me, seriously?
Oh great, let me reset my password.
I reset my password, logged in on my computer, and made the wire transfer. It took me ~15 minutes. It was a pain.
Of course, that wasn’t the final pain. I know passwords don’t offer strong protection so I always use a random strong password generator. My new password was something similar to Rvan_pj-J7*5x>c. Pretty good, right? It’s also a huge pain to transfer that password over to mobile, and because I changed my password on my computer, FaceID was disabled in my app until I entered my new password there. I looked at my computer, back to my phone, back and forth, character by character. The password was challenging for me to enter and I typed it in wrong three times so I got locked out of my account.
Okay, maybe that one was my fault.
I called customer service. There was a 40 minute wait time, maybe partially with others like me? I gave them my name, SSN, date of birth, and I was back into my account with another new password. This time I used a strong password generator on my phone and now I’m back to using FaceID in the app.
I can't wait for the next time I need to make a wire transfer.
As a consumer, this seems like a no brainer to fix. Hey bank (or any other platform with an app, for that matter), just find a way for my computer to realize that I’m logged in on my phone and connect the two. That seems simple enough. It’s not… or rather it wasn’t simple. Options were surprisingly limited. Do you connect your phone to your computer via Bluetooth? That’s a pain and some people don’t know how to do that. What about WiFi? That’s difficult too because you can have multiple people on one WiFi network, which also creates security issues.
Keyri makes it simple.
How about adding a QR code? Just add a QR code! Scan a QR code with your phone. My phone knows it’s me because I passed FaceID (and could have used another form of biometrics instead). My computer doesn’t. Scan a QR code with your phone. Extend the trust that exists on your phone to your computer.
That’s what we’re doing at Keyri. We’re enabling companies to offer login with QR. We’ve made it that simple and we did it so the two minute bank transfer actually takes two minutes. No more company excuses. So the next time you’re doing a simple task and desktop login makes it painful, ask yourself, why can’t the company I use just do better? Keyri exists – find companies that care enough to make sure the two minute experience doesn’t take longer.
As I mentioned in my last post and will continue mention going forward, have any questions or suggestions? Feel free to email me at grant@keyri.com or visit our website at https://keyri.com/. I look forward to changing authentication with you so desktop login can be just as easy as on mobile!