A smile or a wave of the hand will be enough to pay in store, here is the promise of Mastercard in a communicated of May 17. The company wants to offer merchants and their customers a biometric payment system from 2022. A project prepared for a long time.
Face or fingerprints as a password
Swiping your bank card or phone on a terminal to pay for your shopping is it already a has-been? Mastercard will launch a biometrics-based payment program this week in five grocery stores in Sao Paolo, Brazil. An experiment that will be extended to the Middle East and Asia, then rolled out to the rest of the world in 2022.
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Mastercard promises that once registered ” there’s no longer a need to slow down the checkout line by rummaging through your pockets or purse “. The company adds “ Consumers can simply check the bill and smile at a camera or wave their hand over a reader to pay “.
Concretely, the user will have to take a photo of his face or scan his fingerprints via a smartphone application. He can then link a bank card to his biometric data to be able to benefit from the Mastercard program, in participating businesses.
The company has teamed up with several partners for the launch of this functionality, Fujitsu, NEC, Aurus, PaybyFace, PopID and Payface. The latter is already at work, in Brazil.
According to a study by KBY Researchthe market for contactless biometric technologies will represent 18.6 billion dollars (17.7 billion euros), by 2026. Mastercard affirms, via a study, that based on a sample of 3422 people in 14 countries that 74 % of consumers would be in favor of biometric technologies.
Biometrics, extremely sensitive data
Yet biometrics is not without fear for the privacy of users. If a password is changeable, it is not possible to change face or fingerprints. This raises the question of the storage of this sensitive data and in particular the duration for which it will be kept.
When the release of a similar payment system, Amazon One, the e-commerce giant had to face strong reluctance in the United States, on this point. In its press release, Mastercard affirms that the security and confidentiality of the data will be ensured, without specifying how.
CNBC reports that customer data will be in an encrypted system. The biometric data will be replaced by a random sequence of alphanumeric characters associated with the payment card.
In France, and in the European Union, biometric data is considered sensitive by the GDPR. They must respect some rules : justify a specific need (access to a place or a service), leave the possibility of choosing an alternative device and keep the biometric data under the exclusive control of the person concerned.
Nothing really seems to oppose the arrival of the Mastercard system, which clearly mentions Europe among the deployment zones. This system could prefigure the current payment infrastructure in a possible future metaverse. A possibility that greatly interests Mastercard.