MasterCard Forecasts Future of Biometric Payments

In the wake of the launch of Apple Pay, MasterCard announced that it recently held a closed pilot to understand the consumer experience around voice and facial recognition, according to a company blog post by Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Safety and Security at MasterCard.

In the wake of the launch of Apple Pay, MasterCard announced that it recently held a closed pilot to understand the consumer experience around voice and facial recognition, according to a company blog post written by Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Safety and Security at MasterCard.

MasterCard’s challenge, wrote Bhalla, is to learn from “different applications of biometrics already in place and elevate them into the next generation of authentication, not just for one platform, but for the mass market globally.”

MasterCard created a beta mobile app, which the company tested in an e-commerce environment on over 14,000 transactions. The results, taken from MasterCard employees around the world, showed “a successful verification rate of 98 percent, mixing a combination of voice and facial recognition” and “the process usually took less than ten seconds.

“As biometric authentication becomes mainstream, we are well positioned to take advantage, with products already in the market and trials pioneering biometric technology underway,” noted Bhalla. “The finger print is just the start.”