Biometrics are changing the way mobile payments are authenticated.
As phone technology advances, more payments are being authenticated with fingerprint, voice, or face recognition. Between in-store and remote mobile payment transactions, approximately $124 billion in payments will be authenticated with biometrics this year, and it’s only just the beginning. A recent study by Juniper Research suggests that a whopping $2 trillion in payments will use biometrics by 2023.
So what does this mean for the future of ecommerce?
Passwords have frustrated consumers for decades. With biometrics comes the hope of never having to struggle to remember complicated pins and passwords - and consumers are ready to make the switch. In fact, 86% of consumers surveyed by Visa said they were interested in using biometrics to verify their identity or confirm a purchase.
It’s not just the convenience of biometric authentication that consumers are excited about, it’s also the security. Nearly half of consumers believe that biometrics are safer than traditional pins and passwords.
While implementing biometric authentication on your mobile site can be challenging and complicated process that requires detailed knowledge of the hardware your customers use, it can done much easier through a mobile app. This is because apps are built for specific mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, etc.), meaning you can design your app to use biometric authentication for logins and payments. Many banking apps, for example, already offer biometric login.
Even if you don’t have an app, there is still a way you can offer a biometric option to your customers. Mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, were created by the phone manufacturers to fully utilize the phone’s hardware. By incorporating a mobile wallet payment option to your store, you can provide the convenience and security of biometrics without the intensive integration work.
Adding biometric authentication to your site is only going to get easier as institutions continue to work to make the technology more accessible.
In fact, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group responsible for developing web standards such as HTML, has a mission to eliminate insecure passwords from the web using tools like biometric recognition.
At this rate, it won’t be long until consumers are about to login and pay with a swipe of their finger, making now an excellent time to start mapping out how you can add biometric authentication to your site.
