“The technology was trialed in South Africa in collaboration with Barclays Africa subsidiary Absa Bank, and supermarket chain Pick n Pay.”
Mastercard has completed successful trials of its new biometric, contactless payment card and has more planned as it seeks to bring it to market.
The announcement comes in the wake of Zwipe’s first public demonstration of its own biometric payment card solution at this week’s Seamless Asia payments expo, indicating the rising level of buzz around this technology. Like Zwipe’s solution, Mastercard’s EMV card enrolls a user’s fingerprint biometrics and stores the encrypted credentials on the card itself. From there, the same user needs to have her finger on the sensor in order for the card to be used. (Zwipe and Mastercard teamed up to work on biometric payment cards in the autumn of 2014, but it is not clear if their new offerings are the result of ongoing collaboration.)
The technology was trialed in South Africa in collaboration with Barclays Africa subsidiary Absa Bank, and supermarket chain Pick n Pay. Commenting in a statement, Pick n Pay CEO Richard van Rensburg proclaimed, “We have been extremely impressed with the robust and secure nature of the technology,” while Absa executive Geoff Lee indicated that bank plans to bring the solution to its customers on a wide basis in the wake of its trial program.
Mastercard says that further trials of the technology are being planned for the APAC region and Europe “in the coming months,” which should further propel competition as interest in biometric payment cards continues to pick up.
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April 20, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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