The FIDO Alliance Welcomes Visa to the Board of Directors

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA and NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 05/20/14 -- The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance (https://www.fidoalliance.org/), an industry consortium revolutionizing online authentication with standards for strong authentication, today announced that Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), the global payments technology company, has joined the FIDO Alliance and been appointed to the Board of Directors. Visa Europe will join the alliance as a sponsor member and will be represented on the board by Visa Inc.

"Strong authentication is vitally important as the future of payments becomes increasingly mobile and digital," said Mark Nelsen, head of risk products and business intelligence, Visa Inc. "As payment technologies continue to advance, an open, scalable and interoperable framework will support a move away from simple, static password-based authentication and towards more advanced methods that will improve security as well as enable more frictionless, convenient commerce."

"With the addition of Visa to the FIDO Alliance board, our leadership includes the world's leading payments networks and services providers. Though FIDO specifications are not currently designed to address all aspects of secure payments, it's clear that payments technologies and services are fundamental to the development of better authentication that is capable of overcoming the risks and limitations associated with password dependencies that date back a half century," said FIDO Alliance president Michael Barrett. "We welcome Visa to the FIDO Alliance board and to the forefront of stronger and easier-to-use authentication."

FIDO Alliance members commit to share technology and collaborate to deliver open specifications for universal strong authentication that enables FIDO-compliant authentication methods to be interoperable, more secure and private, and easier-to-use.

FIDO specifications will support a full range of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint, eye and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition, as well as further enabling existing solutions and communications standards, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), USB Security Tokens, embedded Secure Elements (eSE), Smart Cards, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). The open specifications are being designed to be extensible and to accommodate future innovation, as well as protect existing investments. FIDO specifications allow the interaction of technologies within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations.

About Visa Inc.
Visa is a global payments technology company that connects consumers, businesses, financial institutions, and governments in more than 200 countries and territories to fast, secure and reliable electronic payments. We operate one of the world's most advanced processing networks -- VisaNet -- that is capable of handling more than 47,000 transaction messages a second, with fraud protection for consumers and assured payment for merchants. Visa is not a bank and does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers. Visa's innovations, however, enable its financial institution customers to offer consumers more choices: pay now with debit, ahead of time with prepaid or later with credit products. For more information, visit usa.visa.com/about-visa, visacorporate.tumblr.com and @VisaNews.

About The FIDO Alliance
The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance, www.fidoalliance.org, was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication technologies, and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. The Alliance plans to change the nature of authentication by developing standards-based specifications for simpler, stronger authentication that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce reliance on passwords. FIDO authentication is stronger, private, and easier to use when authenticating to online services.

The FIDO Alliance Board of Directors includes leading global organizations: ARM Holdings plc (LSE: ARM) (NASDAQ: ARMH); Bank of America Corporation (NYSE: BAC); BlackBerry®; CrucialTec (KRX: 114120); Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS); Google; IdentityX; Lenovo; MasterCard (NYSE: MA); Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT); Nok Nok Labs, Inc.; NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI); Oberthur Technologies OT; PayPal (NASDAQ: EBAY); RSA®; Samsung Electronics, Ltd (KOSCOM: SECL); Synaptics (NASDAQ: SYNA); Visa Inc. (NYSE: V); Yubico.

Media Contacts:

Suzanne Matick
for FIDO Alliance
831-479-1888
suzanne@matick.net

Sandra Chu
Visa Inc.
650 432 1217
sanchu@visa.com

Source: The FIDO Alliance; Visa Inc.