Mastercard to Offer Biometric Payment Methods Soon For Retailers | How Does it Work?

Mastercard has announced that it has begun its trial, which involves a unique payment method quite different from the usual.

Initially, the company says that its program is intended for retailers who will use fingerprint scanning and facial recognition. There's no need anymore to use your card to purchase a product.

Mastercard Launches Facial-Recognition Payment System

According to a report by Bloomberg, Mastercard has already started its experiment with its new biometric payment system dubbed as Biometric Checkout Program.

The program is simple to understand since the shopper will only be required to scan their faces through a smartphone app. This means that this will be a substitute for the usual bank card that you use when you buy goods from a store.

More importantly, this technology can be seen in what Apple implemented previously. In particular, it's comparable to FaceID, which the Cupertino giant rolls out to iPhone users who want to initiate a payment procedure.

For the first trial, Mastercard has chosen five grocery stores located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The global launch for this tech could likely hit the latter part of 2022.

"All the research that we've done has told us that consumers love biometrics. They want to make a payment at a store to be as convenient as opening their phone," Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence Ajay Bhalla, said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, May 17.

For this part, Mastercard anticipates that nearly 1.4 billion will adopt this biometric payment system by 2025. That's double the number compared to the 2020 record, which hit 671 million users worldwide, Juniper Research shares in its forecast.

How Does this Biometric Payment System Work

According to CNBC, you just need to snap an image of your face using a retailer app. It works similarly when you scan your fingerprint.

After you finish doing this task, you can now begin to add a credit card. Your biometric data will later be connected to this card.

To give you a quick look, it's somehow similar to what Amazon offers in the United States -- the palm-scanning payment system.

As technology progresses around the world, Mastercard wants to get ahead of its tack in making this invention "globally interoperable."

Bhalla says that you can automatically utilize this tech anywhere you want when you have already put your credentials into the system.

Safety and Privacy

Although it's very convenient to use since it's hassle-free and card-free, some people are worried about their privacy and safety if they use this method.

At the same time, they wonder how the system obtains all of their confidential information in one go.

To clarify this concern, Mastercard tells its customers that the data in its system will be encrypted so that their privacy will be guaranteed and safe from being compromised.

The company explains that it has a proper standard to safeguard every consumer data. To add, Mastercard says that it is collaborating with other companies, including PopID, Fujitsu, Payface, and more, for this feature.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry