MasterCard and Visa say consumers want more biometric payments
26 February, 2016
category: Biometrics, Financial
Consumers are getting much more comfortable with biometric payments, based on information released this week by Visa and MasterCard.
Research from the fourth annual MasterCard Mobile Payments Study finds cardholders increasingly are asking for mobile payment options.MasterCard and PRIME Research compiled 2 million global social media comments about mobile payments in 2015. They found just 85,000 such posts in their 2012 study.
Digital wallets dominated the mobile payments conversations, but biometrics was also popular. The study found that biometrics – and the prospect of no more passwords – were among the most engaging topics based on social conversations in 163 countries. The most talked about biometric payment options were fingerprint, electrocardiogram (ECG) technology and facial recognition.
Visa is working with Morpho (Safran) to showcase new payment options including biometric recognition. Biometrics would be used in conjunction with existing payment methods – like debit cards or mobile – to strengthen security in transactions.
Morpho and Visa demonstrated several new payment concepts this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain and at Visa’s innovation center in San Francisco. Visitors got to see MorphoWave technology up close – billed as the world’s first biometric solution matching four fingerprints with a single hand movement in less than a second.
“Building on a number of successful proofs of concept, we have seen the enthusiasm shared by customers for new solutions that combine security and convenience,” says Morpho CEO Anne Bouverot. “We are convinced by the potential of biometrics as a cornerstone technology for the future of secure payments.”
Visa is pursuing innovative security solutions based on global trends. A forecast from Goode Intelligence predicts one billion customers will use biometrics to access banking services by 2017.
