After COVID-19, Biometrics Will Be Essential to Payments Market: Goode Intelligence

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed the course of the payments industry, with biometric technologies now poised to play a critical role, according to a new report from Goode Intelligence.

Entitled “Biometrics for Payments; Market and Technology Analysis, Adoption Strategies and Forecasts 2021-2026 – 3rd Edition”, the 336-page report offers a detailed look at how biometric technologies will be further integrated into the payments sector in the coming years. Among the broader trends in its forecast are the rise of biometric payment cards and the rise of tokenless “naked” payments that use biometrics to authorize transactions.

These kinds of solutions, still in a nascent stage, have been emerged over the past few years, but the impact of COVID-19 will solidify their importance – and that of biometrics in general – in the payments space, the report says. That’s because the pandemic has driven so many transactions into digital channels, and has dissuaded consumers from touching shared PIN pads and POS devices when shopping in person.

“The future is contactless for physical, in-store payments,” asserted Goode Intellience CEO Alan Goode in a report summary. “Mobile wallets powered by biometric authentication have been a success for both in-store and digital payments. Their growth has accelerated during the pandemic as they are both contactless and do not have spending limits versus current EMV contactless cards which do have limits.”

Goode added that, going forward, mobile wallets are expected to split their marketshare with emerging biometric payment cards. Ultimately, though, naked payments that require no card, phone, or hardware of any kind will become the norm.

“With ever increasing improvements in performance of biometric systems they are likely to become good enough to be used on their own without a token to authenticate customers and approve payment transactions – enabling the ‘pay by me’ service to emerge,” Goode said.

Putting some numbers to the trends outlined, the Goode Intelligence report forecasts that global biometric payments will reach a value of $5.765 trillion by 2026, and that there will be over three billion biometric payment users by that year as well. At least one fifth of all payment cards shipped in 2026, meanwhile, will be biometric payment cards.

The full report can be found on the Goode Intelligence website.

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Mar. 30, 2021 – by Alex Perala