Alibaba’ payments arm Alipay has partnered up with Chinese handset maker Huawei to help consumers have mobile payments literally at their fingertips. The companies are working to create a mobile payments system that uses the fingerprint reader to be built into Huawei’s forthcoming Mate 7 handset.
The new biometric payment system will allow Alipay wallet holders to confirm transactions with a simple swipe of the finger—eliminating the need for passwords, reports Finextra.
The system resembles the one developed by Samsung for American rival PayPal for the Galaxy S5 phone. It is also widely believed that Apple will incorporate its TouchID reader into a mobile payments framework to accompany the official announcement of the iPhone 6 next week.
Bloomberg reports that deals have been struck with Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover to enable touch-based payments.
Alipay and Huawei have responded to concerns that biometrics have recently proven prone to hacks, that their system provides “chip level security.” This means that though biometric data is stored on the phones, it will be encrypted and available to certain authorized third-party apps for transactions.
