Market for biometric cards is unstoppable

Growth in con­tact­less pay­ments began before the coro­n­avirus out­break, but increas­ing spend­ing lim­its have raised ques­tions about secu­ri­ty. How­ev­er, the pan­dem­ic is like­ly to dri­ve greater use of bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion, which is already being seen with mobile pay­ments across the globe.

The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion has urged peo­ple to use con­tact­less pay­ments instead of cash at a time when the UK has raised its con­tact­less lim­it to £45, along­side sim­i­lar increas­es in oth­er coun­tries. But with no increased secu­ri­ty. This has the poten­tial for more fraud, yet the lim­it is still too low for a family’s gro­cery shop­ping. The need to enter a PIN, which is eas­i­ly for­got­ten, is also a sec­ond-rate user expe­ri­ence. Research shows con­sumers are tired of PINs and pass­words.

“Glob­al­ly, there’s a real need right now for bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion, for both pay­ments and access, whether it involves fin­ger­prints or iris scans,” says Chris­t­ian Fredrik­son, chief exec­u­tive of Fin­ger­prints, a Swedish com­pa­ny that‘s shipped more than a bil­lion fin­ger­print sen­sors. “At the same time, hack­er intel­li­gence and tools are get­ting bet­ter. We must stay one step ahead. Present­ly, PINs and pass­words are ridicu­lous­ly easy to hack.”

To date 21 banks around the world are pilot­ing con­tact­less bio­met­ric pay­ment cards on both Mas­ter­card and Visa net­works, includ­ing Natwest and RBS in the UK, and there’s also been a com­mer­cial launch in Switzer­land, all using Fin­ger­prints tech­nol­o­gy. The main ben­e­fits are high­er lev­els of secu­ri­ty and con­ve­nience, since you don’t need to enter a PIN, and greater speed.

Touch­less access will be even more vital in this coro­n­avirus-aware era

“Con­sumer feed­back has been real­ly pos­i­tive. The major­i­ty would like to have this card in the future and would rec­om­mend it to a friend. There’s even a will­ing­ness to pay for a bio­met­ric card. There’s now a strong dri­ve from the glob­al bank­ing ecosys­tem to launch this,” says Fredrik­son, whose com­pa­ny is the largest sup­pli­er of bio­met­rics to the glob­al bank­ing indus­try.

“There are also secu­ri­ty, data and big broth­er con­cerns, but in the case of bio­met­ric con­tact­less pay­ments, you’re not shar­ing your per­son­al data with any­one, it doesn’t leave the card. The consumer’s data is encrypt­ed, matched and ver­i­fied on the card when pay­ments are made. Bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion is a real­ly safe way to deal with the pay­ment cap.”

Bio­met­rics have already achieved huge suc­cess in the mobile mar­ket. Near­ly three quar­ters of all smart­phones sold have bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion built in and more than 80 per cent now use it to unlock phones, secure apps and make pay­ments. Fin­ger­prints also works with eight of ten top glob­al mobile device man­u­fac­tur­ers to facil­i­tate their authen­ti­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy.

“We’ve seen tremen­dous growth in bio­met­rics in smart­phones; it’s only a mat­ter of time before this comes at scale to con­tact­less card pay­ments. We also see huge ben­e­fits in oth­er sec­tors too, where pass­words are not the answer and can be eas­i­ly hacked, such as remote and home work­ing with secure login to com­pa­ny sys­tems, and entry into build­ings with touch­less bio­met­rics or bio­met­ric access cards. This trend is set to con­tin­ue,” says the chief exec­u­tive of Fin­ger­prints, which authen­ti­cates more than ten bil­lion touch­es on its sen­sors dai­ly.

Ear­li­er this year the NHS looked at upgrad­ing its authen­ti­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy for com­put­er logins by employ­ees, replac­ing pass­words with bio­met­rics such as fin­ger­print access.

“Touch­less access will be even more vital in this coro­n­avirus-aware era. The big issue is the ‘dilem­ma of oppo­sites’: the pub­lic want 21st-cen­tu­ry, top-grade secu­ri­ty, but they also want total con­ve­nience. Bio­met­rics is the only answer to mar­ry the two,” says Fredrik­son.

Aware­ness of the ben­e­fits of bio­met­rics is grow­ing. How fast will it be adopt­ed? Only time will tell. His­to­ry has clues. It only took eight years to reach a bil­lion con­tact­less cards. This need­ed new pay­ment infra­struc­ture. For bio­met­ric cards this isn’t nec­es­sary as they already work in con­tact­less ter­mi­nals. There­fore, the roll­out will be faster. “Bio­met­rics brings huge ben­e­fits to many indus­tries. The mar­ket is tru­ly unstop­pable,” Fredrik­son con­cludes.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it fingerprints.com