Dive Brief:
- Mastercard and Google Pay are partnering to extend biometric payment services to customers in India, the two companies said in a press release last week.
- Using Mastercard’s device verification system, the company’s cardholders can authenticate digital transactions using facial recognition or fingerprint features on their smartphones. The tool lets users make purchases without needing one-time passwords, the release said.
- The card network and the technology behemoth are introducing the feature to customers in India by the end of the year, a Mastercard spokesperson said in an email, without commenting why that market was selected for the effort.
Dive Insight:
As the two companies roll out the tool in the coming months, they aim to facilitate broader biometric payment usage across the country, allowing consumers to pay everything from utility bills to online retailer checkouts, the release noted.
“By leveraging the biometric capabilities already available on smartphones, we aim to make everyday payments faster and more intuitive,” Mastercard’s senior vice president of customer solutions in South Asia, Ravi Datla, said in the release.
Like Purchase, New York-based Mastercard, other payments providers are offering biometric technologies to authenticate payments. Earlier this year, Fiserv said it planned to enable its Clover merchant clients to verify customers’ payments using their faces and palms. The company said it expected to introduce it to Clover customers throughout this year.
Biometric tools are authenticating everything from payments to digital driver’s licenses and passports, but adoption of technology varies from one culture to the next. While some countries, such as China, Singapore and India, are more accustomed to biometric payments, consumers in the U.S. and Europe might be more reluctant to use them because of privacy concerns, possible civil rights violations and anxiety regarding their personal data.
