OCBC to Enable Naked Payments with Merchant Partners

Singapore’s OCBC bank is teaming up with Touché on a pioneering naked payments initiative.

Touché first announced its biometric payments system at the beginning of last year. It’s designed to link fingerprint biometrics to credit card information, essentially replacing the physical card with a biometric scan at the point of sale. It’s a groundbreaking new approach to payments that has only seen a few trials worldwide, and by partnering with OCBC, Touché now has an opportunity to become a frontrunner in this new market area.

And Singapore may offer a ready market for the technology. As The Business Times reports, a Visa-commissioned survey from earlier this year suggested that 96 percent of Singaporeans are interested in using biometrics to make payments, seeing the technology as a useful replacement of PINs and passwords.

Of course, there is an important infrastructure issue to overcome, with few (if any) merchants currently using fingerprint scanners to accept payments. Touché and OCBC have not offered a detailed plan for rolling out the technology, but Touché’s POS terminals are designed to process both fingerprint scans and physical payment cards, and the companies say that the naked payments service will be offered to all OCBC credit card merchant partners that have physical stores.

Sources: The Business Times, Global Banking & Finance Review

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May 24, 2018 – by Alex Perala