Passkey Strategy: Why Your Passkey Implementation Will Fail

Passkeys are emerging as the new standard login, offering a frictionless user experience and stronger security than passwords. Enterprises adopt passkeys for three main reasons:

• Improving UX and Revenue (E-Commerce & Transaction-Oriented Companies): Passkeys create a seamless login experience, minimizing friction at checkout, boosting conversion rates, increasing customer retention, and reducing password resets. For e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, authentication is directly tied to revenue - every login barrier removed translates to higher customer retention and more completed transactions.

• Enhancing Security While Cutting Costs (Large Enterprises & 2FA-Focused Sectors): Passkeys help reduce reliance on costly SMS OTPs, significantly cutting authentication expenses. Large enterprises, government agencies, and compliance-heavy industries currently using traditional two-factor authentication (2FA) are turning to passkeys as a cost-effective, secure alternative.

• Going Fully Passwordless (Financial Institutions & Fraud-Targeted Enterprises): Banks, fintech platforms, and high-risk businesses are adopting passkeys to eliminate passwords entirely and move to a phishing-resistant authentication model. Passkeys are immune to credential stuffing, replay attacks, and social engineering tactics - critical benefits for industries frequently targeted by fraud.

However, simply implementing and enabling passkeys does not ensure success for large scale deployments – projects often fail. Adoption, strategic rollout, and enterprise-wide integration are key to project success. The challenge is not just offering passkeys but driving adoption os passkeys. This article outlines a four-phase strategy to implement passkeys, drive adoption, transition to password-less authentication, and automate recovery:

It also explores how Corbado leverages data-driven insights to maximize ROI, cut authentication costs, significantly reduce SMS spending, go passwordless and strengthen security.

Introducing passkeys as a login option is the first step toward a more secure and user-friendly authentication system. However, passkey implementation is not a one-size-fits-all process - how you add passkeys depends on your existing authentication setup. We have already covered the implementation complexity in our blog a lot (e.g. here and here) and explained how to get the implementation right.

When starting the implementation, enterprises typically fall into one of three categories regarding their existing authentication setup:

Implementing passkeys requires navigating a highly complex ecosystem. The challenge is not just adding support for WebAuthn but ensuring seamless compatibility across thousands of OS/browser/passkey provider combinations:

• Passkeys represent a major shift in user experience, causing initial confusion due to unfamiliarity and inconsistent behaviors across browsers and devices.

• Users often struggle with unclear messaging and unknown edge cases, significantly reducing trust and adoption rates.

• Enterprises underestimate how deeply ingrained password habits are, making proactive user education, clear UX guidance, and frictionless onboarding crucial.

• Passkey implementations demand significant upfront engineering efforts due to the complexity of WebAuthn protocols and the diversity of device/browser interactions.

• Integration with existing identity providers (IdPs) or customer identity and access management (CIAM) systems introduces additional technical challenges, often underestimated until implementation is underway.

• Continuous updates in WebAuthn specifications require ongoing maintenance and specialized developer expertise, increasing the long-term cost and complexity.

• Enterprises frequently struggle to justify passkey investments without clear evidence of immediate operational cost savings, such as reduced SMS OTP spending and decreased support tickets.

• Initial UX friction can inadvertently increase customer support requests, offsetting expected savings unless carefully managed through proactive user guidance and well-designed fallback processes.

• Without a strategic approach to driving adoption, enterprises risk failing to realize the anticipated reduction in fraud, phishing attacks, and associated financial losses.

• Regulatory uncertainty (e.g., PSD2 and other compliance frameworks) adds complexity, with enterprises often unclear on how passkeys fit within existing regulatory landscapes.

• New security risks emerge around device sharing and passkey synchronization, creating potential vulnerabilities if not properly managed.

• Enterprises must proactively establish robust monitoring and auditing capabilities to detect and mitigate emerging security threats, emphasizing the critical role of real-time observability and compliance management.

To successfully navigate these complexities, enterprises must move beyond simple implementation, leveraging comprehensive solutions such as Corbado’s that combine seamless integration, strategic adoption guidance, analytics-driven insights, and proactive security compliance management.

Corbado provides a comprehensive passkey solution that eliminates the complexity of WebAuthn implementation across different authentication setups. Whether you own your authentication system, manage a custom frontend with an IDP backend, or rely on a fully managed IDP solution, Corbado ensures seamless passkey integration and deployment, and adoption tracking.

• Backend SDKs & WebAuthn Server: Handles all WebAuthn registration, authentication, and cryptographic flows, eliminating the need to build an in-house WebAuthn infrastructure.

• Frontend SDKs & UI Components: Provides pre-built, customizable UI elements for login, registration, and passkey management, simplifying cross-browser and cross-device implementation.

• IDP Compatibility & Vendor Agnostic: Works alongside existing IDPs like Okta, Auth0, IBM, Cognito, and others, extending passkey support even when native vendor support is missing.

• Cross-Browser & Cross-OS Compatibility: Pre-tested and validated across thousands of browser, OS, and passkey provider combinations, reducing testing overhead.

• Fallback Handling & Seamless Login Flows: Ensures smooth transitions from password-based logins to passkeys, preventing lockouts and friction in adoption. Also, devices are automatically detected and passkeys offered based on the detected device.

• Passkey-First UX & Enrollment Acceleration: Nudges users toward passkey adoption by guiding them through automated passkey creation and secure fallback flows. Moreover, the UI components are optimized for passkeys

DIY implementations often neglect real-time monitoring and security compliance, which become critical at scale. Without them, passkey deployments face security risks, operational blind spots, and high maintenance costs. Corbado eliminates these issues by providing:

• Authentication Logging & Debugging: Tracks every passkey event for security insights and troubleshooting.

• Adoption & Performance Analytics: Monitors passkey usage, fallback rates, and UX bottlenecks for optimization.

• Gradual Rollout: Enables phased deployment for controlled adoption per browser or on different applications.

• WebAuthn Security Automation: Offloads cryptographic enforcement and risk handling.

• Always Up-to-Date SDKs & APIs: Maintains cross-browser, cross-device compatibility.

Most enterprises focus solely on the initial rollout, neglecting scalability, security, observability, and adoption until problems arise. Corbado ensures your passkey deployment remains secure, optimized, and built to scale. But more critically, passkey adoption is often overlooked entirely left unmeasured and unmanaged. At Corbado, adoption is the only metric that defines success. Everything we do is engineered to guarantee high adoption and therefore high passkey login rate.

As we have outlined above most enterprises focus on implementing passkeys at scale, but the real challenge isn’t deployment - it’s adoption. In this section, we will take a look why low adoption kills your passkey project.

If users don’t switch to passkeys and the passkey login rate don’t rise, the project has already failed: Users are not getting used to passkeys, security risks remain, costs don’t decrease and passwords continue to dominate. Managing this transition is the most critical part of the journey. The following table summarizes why this is so important.

This phase is where Corbado’s software helps in every step of the transition. We’ve outlined the exact strategies in our Enterprise Guide and built our software around it. Increase passkey adoption at scale and build analytics to ensure users make the switch is at the core of our solution.

To emphasize the importance of adoption, we will dedicate an entire article to it because without adoption, the entire passkey project fails.

Managing user behavior, measuring progress, and guiding users to switch is where real success happens. Passkey adoption is the turning point - without it, enterprises don’t reduce costs, don’t improve security, and don’t eliminate passwords. This is why transition management is the most important phase of any passkey project.

Going passwordless and leaving only passkeys as phishing resistant authentication is the ultimate goal of a passkey strategy. This step entails turning off passwords.

The timing and strategy depend on industry, security needs, and user readiness. This phase is usually the next step after passkey adoption reaches a critical login rate, but in some cases, especially in high-security sectors like finance, organizations must go passwordless immediately to eliminate phishing risks.

How to go passwordless with passkeys?

Because this transition is crucial and requires a data-driven strategy, we will dedicate an entire article to it, outlining the best practices and rollout strategies when going all-in with passkeys.

Corbado’s analytics system plays a key role in determining when a user is ready to turn off their password. By tracking important touchpoints in the login and post-login journey, our system gradually transfers passkey-experienced customers first to a future without passwords.

This transition is almost never part of the initial passkey implementation it requires real adoption data and progressive user readiness tracking. With Corbado Connect, password removal is an additional layer that can be activated at a later stage, ensuring a smooth, controlled transition to a fully passwordless authentication model within the same Enterprise Passkey Framework.

Even with robust passkey adoption and a near-complete or fully passwordless environment, users will occasionally lose access to their passkeys or primary devices even though this happens much less frequent than for passwords or mobile numbers. This makes well-designed fallback and recovery methods essential.

A strategic, automated recovery process not only preserves your hard-earned security gains but also prevents costly support bottlenecks. The goal is to ensure that even in worst-case scenarios like a lost device or revoked passkey users can reliably regain access without compromising the system’s overall security level.

For higher-security or regulated use cases, advanced (“smart”) recovery solutions go beyond simple email or phone OTP. They often involve digital identity verification (IDV), photo ID checks, and liveness checks. Here’s how these methods improve both security and user experience:

• Selfie + Liveness Verification: Users can securely recover their account by taking a live selfie alongside their photo ID. Modern identity-verification providers perform real-time biometric checks to confirm that (1) the ID is valid, and (2) the selfie is of a real, live person matching that ID. This helps prevent fraud and stolen-ID scenarios, making it a powerful alternative to manual KYC processes.

• Cross-Device & Known Environment Fallback: If a user still has access to another trusted device with a valid passkey, they can recover by scanning a secure QR. This streamlined fallback leverages the user’s existing passkeys and device trust to restore access instantly.

• Reduced Manual Support: By digitizing verification, enterprises can drastically cut down on manual support overhead, which is particularly costly for large MFA deployments. Automated flows guide users step-by-step, lowering the volume of tickets and calls to the help desk.

Passkey-recovery events happen less often especially for consumers because most passkeys are now synced to cloud accounts (e.g., Apple iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager). A user switching devices within the same ecosystem automatically has access to their synced passkeys. However, in cross-ecosystem moves (like iOS to Android) or if a user loses access to a phone number used for fallback, a robust and automated recovery flow becomes critical. Establishing at least one synced passkey before turning passwords off is recommended.

Just as Corbado helps in earlier phases with passkey implementation, real-time adoption metrics and gradual password removal, it also provides out-of-the-box recovery flows and analytics to maintain user access securely with an adaptive recovery flow.

• Identifier Verification: Corbado first confirms the user’s verified email or phone number to establish a secure contact channel.

• Smart MFA Options: If security requirements demand, Corbado can initiate an automated liveness check or ID verification, ensuring that the user truly is who they claim to be.

• Known Session Environment: Systems can factor in location, device fingerprint, or previous successful logins to streamline a low-friction recovery if the risk level is low.

Automating recovery is the final piece that completes the passwordless puzzle. By ensuring high-security fallback methods whether simple or “smart” you preserve the benefits of passkeys and maintain a frictionless user experience. A well-planned recovery is essential for building confidence in a world without passwords. It ensures that the vast security and user-experience gains you’ve cultivated in Phases I through III remain intact even when users lose their primary passkey.

Passkeys are a strong shift in authentication, promising better security, a frictionless user experience, and cost savings. However, as we have outlined, simply enabling passkeys is not enough. Adoption, strategic rollout, and enterprise-wide integration are the keys to success. In the introduction, we identified three core motivations for enterprises adopting passkeys, each of which is directly influenced by the challenges and strategies covered in the four phases of passkey implementation.

• How to improve UX and revenue with passkeys? Passkeys significantly improve the user experience by eliminating password friction, leading to higher retention and conversion rates. However, as seen in Phase II (Adoption), simply making passkeys available is not enough users must be actively guided into switching. The adoption challenge is particularly pronounced in enterprises with custom authentication systems or IDP/CIAM backends with a custom frontend, where UX decisions heavily influence whether users embrace passkeys. Clear messaging, progressive passkey enrollment, and strategic nudging are critical for ensuring that passkeys are not just an option but the preferred authentication method. Enterprises must also monitor adoption rates, refine onboarding flows, and provide seamless fallback mechanisms to remove friction.

• How to enhance security and cut costs with passkeys? Passkeys eliminate phishing risks and reduce reliance on costly SMS OTPs, but these benefits only materialize when adoption is high. As covered in Phase III (Passwordless Transition), reducing authentication costs requires a structured, data-driven approach that moves beyond simply enabling passkeys to actively making them the dominant authentication method. Enterprises with fully managed IDP/CIAM solutions face a particular challenge here, as they have limited control. However, Corbado provides tools to track passkey usage, enforce passkey-first logins, and gradually phase out passwords in alignment with security and compliance goals. Additionally, organizations with custom authentication systems must ensure that their security policies and fallback options do not inadvertently keep passwords in use.

• How to go passwordless with passkeys?: A truly secure, password-free authentication ecosystem is the ultimate goal, but reaching it requires careful planning. A well thought through adoption and automated recovery strategy ensures that removing passwords does not lead to higher support costs or security vulnerabilities. Enterprises must implement fallback solutions that do not reintroduce weak authentication methods, such as email-based resets or insecure device recovery flows. Custom authentication systems must build and maintain their own recovery mechanisms, while enterprises using IDP/CIAM backends must integrate fallback options that align with vendor capabilities. Corbado automates this process with smart MFA recovery, cross-device authentication, and adaptive fallback strategies, ensuring that users remain secure and operational even in worst-case scenarios.

Regardless of an enterprise’s authentication architecture, the success of passkeys depends not on implementation alone but on adoption, transition, and security management. Enterprises that fail to drive adoption risk maintaining the same security vulnerabilities and costs, even after implementing passkeys. Corbado ensures that enterprises can not only implement passkeys but also drive user adoption, enforce passwordless policies, and manage secure recovery without compromising the user experience.