Just Smile or Wave, Folks

Mastercard unveiled its Biometric Checkout Program on Tuesday, a new global payments framework that allows you to pay at the register with a smile or wave of the hand. It'll be piloted at five stores in Brazil starting this week before being rolled out globally later this year.

💳🙂👋 Driving the move… In six words: payment fraud, convenience, and the metaverse.

• From the card company’s perspective: Payment fraud tripled to $30B+ over the past decade, and the law in most countries leaves card companies on the hook for all or most of it.
• From our perspective: 24% of global banking customers cited criminals using their payment cards to make purchases as their leading financial privacy and security concern, per a FICO survey. (And in addition to added security, biometric payments are a tad more convenient.)
• The metaverse: Mastercard’s program aims to set global standards that banks, merchants, and tech providers can adhere to… meaning its infrastructure could (and most likely will) be linked to an individual’s blockchain to facilitate purchases in future virtual worlds.

✋ Yes, but: This has all raised privacy concerns over data storage and tracking. As Suzie Miles, a partner at law firm Ashfords, told The Guardian: “A password can be changed, your smile and wave can not.”

• In Mastercard’s instance, the biometric data entering its system is replaced with a “token” – a random string of alphanumeric characters – and then linked to your payment card.

📸 Big picture: ~1.4 billion people are expected to use facial recognition tech to authenticate a payment by 2025, per a forecast from Juniper Research.