Chinese internet company Tencent has embarked on a government partnership to help the company roll out a new mPayment service, according to a Xinhua article on Want China Times.
Its new mPayment subsidiary, Tenpay, is partnering up with the National Citizen Identity Information Center, a division of China’s Ministry of Public Security. The partnership will see Tenpay receive help from police in refining its facial recognition technology, which the company aims to use for customer authentication.
Tenpay is meant to provide customers with an entirely digital financial services experience, and as such the company is keen to develop biometric authentication systems to ensure the security of user data. (Moreover, Tencent is one of Microsoft’s partners in pushing the new Windows 10 OS in the Chinese market, which itself employs biometric user authentication.)
It looks like the company is to some extent playing catch-up with its rivals. Alibaba, for example, is launch Alipay in China, an mPayment service that also will reportedly use facial recognition for user authentication. And, of course, there’s also the reigning mPayment giant, Apple Pay, which is also set to debut in China this year and uses fingerprint recognition technology for authentication. It isn’t the only competition on the horizon either, but with a branch of the Chinese government backing Tenpay’s efforts, it could prove a major contender in that market.
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April 17, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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