Passkeys now log people in nearly a third faster than passwords do — and fintech is adopting them fastest of any industry.
5 Stats on the Slow, Steady Death of the Password
5 billion passkeys are now in active use worldwide, with a 93% login success rate versus 63% for passwords. Here's the passwordless shift in five numbers.
The password isn't dead yet, but the data makes a pretty strong case for why it should be.
The numbers
- 5 billion passkeys are now in active use worldwide, according to the FIDO Alliance's 2026 State of Passkeys report.
- 93% vs 63% — the login success rate for passkeys versus traditional passwords.
- 8.5 seconds vs 31.2 seconds — average sign-in time with a passkey compared to a password.
- 60% — passkey adoption in fintech specifically, well ahead of e-commerce (35%), SaaS (28%), and media (18%).
- 68% of the 1,400 enterprises FIDO surveyed have deployed, are deploying, or are piloting passkeys for workforce logins, with 28% already fully passwordless across most employees.
- 48% of the top 100 websites globally now offer passkeys as a login option — more than double the figure from 2022.
Why it matters
The login-speed numbers alone (8.5 seconds versus 31.2) explain why product teams like passkeys — that's real friction removed from every sign-in, multiplied across millions of users. But the bigger story is in the industry split: fintech's 60% adoption rate isn't really about convenience, it's about phishing resistance. A password can be typed into a fake login page; a passkey, tied cryptographically to the real domain, can't. For an industry where credential theft is the most common fraud vector, that's not a nice-to-have — it's the entire pitch.
Sources
Five Billion Passkeys, FIDO Alliance, Passkey Adoption Rates by Industry in 2026, MojoAuth.
Frequently asked questions
Both, depending on the platform — 28% of organizations report being fully passwordless across most of their workforce already, while the rest still run passkeys alongside passwords as an option. Consumer-facing adoption (75% of people have enabled a passkey on at least one account) is ahead of full enterprise rollout.
The combination of high fraud risk and regulatory pressure around strong authentication makes the login-speed and phishing-resistance benefits of passkeys worth more in financial services than in, say, media — where the stakes of a compromised login are lower.