Money20/20 Europe: Mastercard Uses Biometrics To Secure Trust

FindBiometrics is reporting live from Money20/20 Europe this week, and today biometrics hit the stage. As we’ve seen with other Money20/20 global events, biometrics are becoming a key component in the future of financial identity, and today Mastercard Chief Security Solutions Officer Ajay Bhalla offered insight into how biometric technology fits into his company’s initiatives to bring assurance and trust to the digital and financial experience.

Bhalla’s talk, titled ‘Securing trust, trusting security,’ outlined major trends in affecting digital security including the Internet of Things (or as Bhalla puts it: Internet of Intelligent Things), the unprecedented amount of data being created and shared, the rise of the sharing economy, and finally the coming of age of the first digital-native generation. The presentation continued to expand on new vulnerability trends in the digital environment Bhalla outlined, like the convergence of physical and information channels, the ignoring of security in the design process, and the increasingly massive scale of modern hack attacks.

When talk turned to what Mastercard is doing to enhance security and trust, Bhalla spoke enthusiastically about the company’s biometrics initiatives, both as password replacements and as on-card authentication mechanisms for point of sale transactions.

 

“Many of you may have heard of Selfie Pay and Fingerprint Pay, and we have been actively pushing these biometric technologies,” said Bhalla. ” As you know, consumers dislike passwords. It’s painful, they don’t really like it. 123456 is the most commonly used password, which is very prone to hacking. So this is going to completely change the way consumers transact in payments.”

“We also introduced biometrics in payment cards,” he said. “Which is now piloting in many markets where you can put your biometrics on a scanner on the card itself.”

Readers of FindBiometrics will know that biometric payment cards are a hot market in the fingerprint sensor arena, with many manufactures and software providers making bold moves to capitalize on the next wave in credit card security. As far as Mastercard is concerned, it counts itself as a pioneer of the technology, with its first pilot of a biometric credit card announced a year ago in South Africa, featuring an IDEX fingerprint sensor.

But payments weren’t the only biometric trend highlighted by Bhalla today at Money20/20. Going on to speak about Mastercard’s efforts in digital identity and reducing online friction for customers, he mentioned the acquisition of NuData, underlining how behavioral biometrics and machine learning will enable a more convenient customer experience.

As a first day presentation, Ajay Bhalla’s keynote positioned biometrics as a key component in the future of digital and physical commerce. Stay tuned to FindBiometrics and out sister site Mobile ID World as we continue to follow this thread throughout Money20/20 Europe this week in Amsterdam.