Let’s face it — passwords suck.

Why? Let me count the ways:

• They’re routinely forgotten
• They’re highly insecure thanks to near-weekly data breaches
• They’re usually pretty crackable
• They’re often shared with friends and family
• They’re reused and recycled across websites

That’s why they’re usually considered the weakest link in the security chain.

And that’s one of the reasons the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance was formed in July 2012 — to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices as well as the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords.

Nok Nok Labs is a founding member of the FIDO Alliance, inventor of FIDO specifications and the market leader in next-generation authentication. The company’s carrier-grade, web-scale authentication platform has been deployed to hundreds of millions of users through leading mobile network operators, fintech, banking, healthcare and IoT customers. Nok Nok is a pioneer in driving the adoption of passwordless next-generation authentication that includes biometric, token or wearable-based authentication of devices and users on mobile, PC and IoT platforms.

That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited to announce our partnership.

Jumio’s identity verification technologies have been integrated with Nok Nok’s S3 Suite for secure account recovery. This means if your phone is lost or stolen, Nok Nok customers don’t have to rely on outdated forms of authentication such as knowledge-based authentication that ask for your mother’s maiden name or the make and model of your first car. KBA is not only an awful user experience, but it’s proven to be vulnerable to cybercriminals who often have the answers to those supposedly secret answers thanks to large-scale data breaches, online sleuthing, social media and the dark web.

With Nok Nok Labs, customers can now leverage Jumio’s AI-powered identity verification, which relies on a government-issued ID and a corroborating selfie to recover access of their apps on a replacement phone.

Every year, tens of millions of smartphones, including company-issued phones, are lost or stolen, with only a small percent recovered. This poses a security risk to consumers and businesses alike who need a secure means of account recovery for legitimate users. That’s why Nok Nok Labs wanted to both streamline and secure the online account recovery process. This is done without compromising security and while complying with policies governing the different regions in which they operate.

The Nok Nok Labs S3 Suite supports different account recovery methods, making it very easy to configure named policies using one or more methods including Jumio Identity Verification. Business customers can use flexible policy to enable combinations of recovery methods and can also dynamically choose the policy to be used based on other risk factors.

This type of flexibility is crucial. As Santosh Rajvaidya, director of product management at Nok Nok Labs, noted: “Strong authentication needs strong recovery as well as a policy-based approach that allows for different combinations of recovery methods.”

If you’re looking to evolve past the password and make the account recovery process a bit more secure, reliable and streamlined, you should check out this new integration.