The proliferation of internet, mobile phones and cloud computing have made the payment industry continuously suffer due to breaches, hacking and theft. Global economy has suffered loss of over $500 billion due to cybercrime, affecting anywhere between 750 –900 million people. In response, Biometrics is emerging as an advanced method of authentication and verification for secure payments. It involves using physiological and behavioralcharacteristics like palm, voice, iris and face for authenticating individuals to offer safer payments. Smartphonesand other hand held devices equipped with touch screens, microphones and high-resolution cameras have led to the biometric payment boom.

1. Biometrics to drive growth of mobile payment
globally
Analyst View Point Series

2. Table of Contents
Market Context
Key Insights
PayNXT360 View

3. Market Context
The proliferation of internet, mobile phones and cloud computing have made the
payment industry continuously suffer due to breaches, hacking and theft. Global
economy has suffered loss of over $500 billion due to cybercrime, affecting anywhere
between 750 – 900 million people.
In response, Biometrics is emerging as an advanced method of authentication and
verification for secure payments. It involves using physiological and behavioral
characteristics like palm, voice, iris and face for authenticating individuals to offer safer
payments. Smartphones and other hand held devices equipped with touch screens,
microphones and high-resolution cameras have led to the biometric payment boom.

4. Key Insights
Biometrics are founding increased acceptance in mobile payment and other payment
channels. Amongst developed countries, Japan tops the chart of biometric used by
banks. It has more than 80,000 ATMs that use biometrics like palm or finger vein
scanning to identify accountholders.
Similarly, USAA bank, a US bank, provides fingerprint, face or voice recognition to
more than 400,000 customers for authentication at the company’s mobile app. Also
last year, MasterCard partnered with First Tech Federal Credit Union to launch one of
the first US biometrics payments pilot, referred to as “Selfie Pay”, that let consumers
make any form of payment, whether in person or online, as secure as possible.

5. Key Insights
While in the UK, Barclays has already introduced voice recognition for users of its
telephone banking service, as well as finger vein biometric scanners. The voice
recognition system verifies customers based on their speech patterns and is being
initially offered to Barclay’s Wealth customers, with the rest of its 12 million customers
to follow later this year.
In rest of the Europe too, biometrics has been picking up. In Poland, about two
thousand cash machines have been equipped with finger vein technology, allowing
people to scan their finger to withdraw money from an ATM without a card or PIN
number, while Sweden also has payment machines that facilitate money withdrawal
using fingers veins for authentication.

6. Key Insights
Developing Asian economies like Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia are also
witnessing upsurge in biometric ATMs from banks. Citigroup recently announced that
it was the first major bank in Asia to roll out voice recognition technology to its retail
customers, part of a move to upgrade its Internet and mobile banking offering across
the region. The bank plans to have at least 1 million Asian users of the technology
within the next 12 months.

7. Key Insights
Recently Payments Association of South Africa (PASA) collaborated with Visa and
Mastercard to develop a standard for biometric authentication for payments in South
Africa. The collaboration is intended to facilitate interoperability. Though the initial
focus of the standard will be only on fingerprint biometrics, but eventually it intends to
cover palm prints, voice, iris and facial recognition, and other forms of biometric data
too.
This new ISO and EMV compliant standard is intended to make the consumer
transactions seamless and secure across the nation. Also, consumers will be
benefitted from exchange of payment instructions across different banks.

8. PayNXT360 View
PayNXT360 believes biometrics would be one of the key drivers for growth of mobile
payment industry globally. The adoption of biometrics authentication process in
traditional payment channels will help adoption in mobile devices for payments. More
importantly, standardization of biometric payment system will enable scalability of
biometric verification. Also, the enhanced customer experience with simplified
processes and lowered turn-around time promises biometrics as the disruptive
technology for payment authentication.

9. To Know More
To know more and gain deeper understanding of
mobile payment industry, click here.