Mastercard Will Allow Shoppers Make In-store Payment Using Their Face Or Hand, Thanks To Its New Technology

On Tuesday, payments titan Mastercard launched a new program for retailers that’ll allow them to offer biometric payments. This technology will enable shoppers to make in-store payments using biometric information such as their facial identity, hand, or fingerprint.

Using this technology, retailers will no longer require shoppers to swipe their cards to authenticate payments at checkout. All they’ll require is a face or a hand. The technology is currently in its pilot stage but has gone live in five St. Marche grocery stores in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The plan is to launch the technology globally before the year comes to an end.

According to Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s President of Cyber and Intelligence, “All the research that we’ve done has told us that consumers love biometrics. They want making a payment at a store to be as convenient as opening their phone.” This makes sense because doing things with biometrics is faster, less time-consuming and fun! Also, according to a forecast made by Juniper Research, at least 1.4 billion people are expected to use facial recognition technology to authenticate transactions by 2025. Mastercard’s move is, therefore, in line with the future.

The Mastercard technology is quite similar to Amazon’s palm-scanning technology.

To sign up for Mastercard’s technology users will have to take a picture of their face and scan their fingerprint using an app. This can be done using either a smartphone or at a payment terminal.

Mastercard says it plans to launch the technology as soon as possible in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The company says that the feature may be integrated with loyalty schemes in the future and could help make personal recommendations to users based on former purchases.

Of course, there is the fear of how safe the technology will be especially because there have been a series of hacks on various crypto networks with how safe they claimed to be. Hackers were able to identify and leverage a weakness.

Mastercard, however says that customers’ data entered into its system is encrypted such that they can be compromised. The company says on registration, biometric information is converted to a “token” – basically a random string of alphanumerical characters. This is then linked to the cards of users. It also added that it has created a set of standards to ensure the protection of consumers’ data.

Mastercard is working with quite a number of companies for its technology. They include  Fujitsu, NEC, Payface, Aurus, PaybyFace, and PopID.

The company’s President of Cyber and Intelligence, Ajay Bhalla, said that Mastercard’s technology could help with the development of a payments system in the metaverse.  “What we are working towards is the metaverse,” he said.

The company recently showed off an AR headset that warned its users of potential fraud when they’re on an e-commerce site. Using this headset, people could also select and buy items from virtual stores using just their eyes.

Mastercard’s technology could really help in the development of a payments infrastructure for the metaverse which is a fast-growing field with everyone trying to lay their hands on it.