Just hours after filing a patent for his newest product, Western Australian Graeme Speak was pitching it to a number of prominent investors in New York.
Speak is the founder of BankVault.com, a cybersecurity startup founded in Perth.
Its newest product is a “radically simple new approach” for ‘passwordless’ logins, allowing companies to implement the technology with only 20 new lines of code, rather than more complex infrastructure changes.
After getting the patent on the latest technology filed, Speak was soon pitching at the July 2020 VentureOut Cyber Demo Day as part of the New York City CyberTech showcase.
Of the 10 pitching startups, two others had passwordless solutions.
But Speak impressed the judges, and BankVault won the best pitch award for the passwordless solution.
“I was really elated,” Speak told Information Age.
“Now that’s done and dusted, we can get out and actually implement it for businesses.”
Passwordless logins offer a more secure way for users to access websites and services, and also provide a more seamless user experience.
A Gartner report predicts 90 per cent of mid-market enterprises will adopt passwordless methods by 2022 in at least half of user cases.
BankVault is operating in a large and competitive market, with six of its rivals having raised almost $1 billion in the last year.
But Speak said his company’s product has the competitive edge and can be deployed in just hours rather than months as it is now a pure browser service, with no apps or software required.
“That’s a dream product – it can now be deployed by an organisation with 20 lines of code in the web server,” he said. “If you’re on a tablet or smartphone it senses that it’s you and logs you in. We’ve collapsed the complexity down so that the organisation deploying this doesn’t have to touch anything.
“The first time in, it will capture the credentials then enough information will be known so that you never touch a keyboard again. Next time you come into that site your user experience is going to the login screen and not touching anything. It senses it’s you and logs you in. It’s dead simple from a user’s point of view.”
The main thing holding back passwordless logins being used by more businesses hasn’t necessarily been the cost, Speak said, but rather the technical work required to implement and the time it will take.
Graeme Speak, founder and CEO of BankVault
BankVault’s new solution has overcome these issues, he said.
“The genius of this is the user has installed nothing and there has been no set up process,” Speak said. “If an organisation is deploying this, there’s no change in management needed and at the back end we’re not getting rid of usernames or passwords.
“If you implement any of our competitors’ products you will need a focused team of capable people there for at least weeks because you can’t afford to get that wrong. What we’re doing is virtually a cosmetic change.
“There’s no technical risk and no security risk. It’s 20 lines of code deployed in 20 minutes. We’re talking hours compared with months. Even a small organisation can now deploy this without any effort.”
BankVault is now looking to get the product out to market and has already secured a channel partner in the United Kingdom and another potential partner in Japan.
The company is also now actively looking for more investment to better address the large market.
“There’s no software, no setup and no changes to the backend,” Speak said. “That’s why we think we can pick up a larger market share and make a bigger dent in the market.
“You can make it available to organisations that don’t have that many resources - it’s a much bigger market.”
