The financial services sector has to change how it promotes security and identity protection to younger emerging bank customers if it is to stay relevant in the face of non-bank challengers, a senior technology executive has claimed. Rocky Scopelliti, Telstra's global industry executive for the banking, finance and insurance sector, quoting a report from management consultants Bain & Co, said that, in 2014, banking entered what he called the "mobile first world," with more transactions completed on mobile devices than any other way.Yet, despite the level of trust this activity implied, less than one in two customers are satisfied with their institution's security performance, and more than one in three say they have been affected by identity theft. Of this latter group, some 40 per cent believe it was the bank's fault.In this 'mobile first' financial services world, an institution's current and future performance can be determined by its ability to "digitally engage" generations X and Y, Scopelliti said."We can't continue on the pathway that we're on, with user ID and password. In a mobile first world we have the opportunity to shift the way we think about trust away from a proof basis onto technologies that recognise you and for who you are," he said. "We have outlived that in terms of our digital behaviour. The average person has about 26 online accounts and the average person cannot remember 26 different configurations of upper case lower case and alpha and numeric."The underlying reasons for this change in perceptions were explored in a research project across seven countries in the Asia Pacific region, Europe and America, backed by Telstra and outlined earlier this week by Scopelliti.Scopelliti said part of the answer was to include measures on how security, privacy and identity were handled alongside other measures of customer satisfaction, such as net promoter score."When it comes to trust, that's the key for consumers," Scopelliti said.And he asserted that the rising incidence of identity theft meant there was a clear need "to shift the trust paradigms away from making people prove who they are, and into technologies that recognise them for who they are." All biometrics ranked very high among the bank customers who took part in in Telstra's research: voice and facial recognition, iris or fingerprint scans, all added to perceived levels of confidence.He noted that Telstra was putting its own research into practice. "We deployed voice biometrics in a range of settings. Initially we piloted that with National Australia Bank about five years ago. Since then that technology has accelerated in adoption across the community including the Department of human services," Scopelliti told Banking Day. He said operations known to be vulnerable to identity theft were being strengthened. For example, call centre operators could be more confident they were dealing with the correct person when using voice biometrics.For the study, Telstra looked at the performance of institutions in terms of identity and security and found a very wide ranging set of results. For example, the USAA Bank had the highest