As consumers continue to embrace mobile payments, they’re growing increasingly enthusiastic about biometric authentication, suggest findings from a recent Visa-commissioned survey.
Carried out by AYTM Market Research in September, the survey polled a thousand US adult consumers who report using mobile payment systems. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they are already familiar with biometrics, and 70 percent said they are easier to use than passwords. Eighty-six percent of respondents expressed interest in using biometrics for payment verification and authentication.
While those figures seem to point to a warm attitude toward mobile biometrics, the survey also found that less than half of the respondents – just 46 percent – felt biometrics are more secure than passwords or PINs. At the same time, less than a third of the respondents said they use a unique password for each of their online accounts. Those findings may point to consumer attitudes prioritizing convenience over security, though more education about biometrics may help to convince many more consumers that biometric security is actually superior to passwords and PINs.
It will certainly be in Visa’s interest to produce such messaging in the months and years to come, with the financial services giant showing a growing interest in biometric security for its products and services; its recently published Future of Security Roadmap for Australia, for example, placed a heavy emphasis on biometric authentication as an important security solution for the rising tide of digital commerce. And in its statement announcing the recent AYTM survey results, Visa highlighted its Visa ID Intelligence platform, which offers partners a curated selection of biometric and other authentication solutions. So even if consumers are happy just to have more convenient authentication technologies, Visa, at least, is keenly aware of the security advantages of biometrics.
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December 14, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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