I keep coming back to a blunt fact: passwords are expensive. Not just annoying — expensive in support time, abandoned checkouts, and breach cleanup.

It has been observed that many companies’ support teams are overloaded with password reset calls. According to research from Forrester, the average cost for a single password reset is about $70. Another report by Gartner estimates that 20% to 50% of all help desk calls are for password resets.

On top of all this, according to a report from IBM, 20% of all breaches came from compromised credentials.