Biometrics Key to Driving Contactless Card Momentum: FPC

“The implementation of fingerprint sensors into contactless cards allows cardholders to be authenticated as they perform transactions, even contactless ones, meaning the consumers don’t need to worry about losing their cards and thereby allowing some fraudster to go around buying things with the wave of a hand.”

Biometric technology is the key to keep the momentum going for contactless payment cards, argues Fingerprint Cards.

Writing on the company’s website, FPC Global Product Marketing Director Lina Andolf-Orup notes that contactless payments have made considerable progress in Europe, where they are “the continent’s ‘new normal’ way to pay”, and in Australia and Canada too, where they are used in a little over half of all payments. But concerns about security are stemming further growth: Contactless card fraud increased 150 percent between the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2017, Andolf-Orup says; and while that kind of fraud only represents a small fraction of overall payment card fraud, 38 percent of consumers cite security as “their primary objection to contactless cards.”

This is where biometric technology offers a solution. The implementation of fingerprint sensors into contactless cards allows cardholders to be authenticated as they perform transactions, even contactless ones, meaning the consumers don’t need to worry about losing their cards and thereby allowing some fraudster to go around buying things with the wave of a hand.

That’s why major financial services firms like Mastercard and Visa are aggressively pursuing the technology, with the latter actively trialing biometric cards featuring FPC technology. These companies and others appear to be aiming to deliver biometric payment cards to the mass market as early as this year, so Andolf-Orup may have very different fraud statistics for contactless payments in 2019.