Societe Generale ‘Experimenting’ with IDEMIA’s Biometric Payment Card

“As with other emerging biometric payment card solutions, the aim is to enhance security with biometrics while maintaining ease of use in tap-to-pay transactions, and improving convenience in contact-based transactions by eliminating the need for PIN entry.”

The French bank Societe Generale is now trialing IDEMIA’s F.Code biometric payment card, the latter has announced.

Featuring an embedded fingerprint sensor provided by Fingerprint Cards, the F.Code is designed to enable biometric authentication for in-store payments, with the user holding a registered finger over the sensor as the card is tapped to the Point-of-Sale terminal for contactless payments, or inserted into the card reader. As with other emerging biometric payment card solutions, the aim is to enhance security with biometrics while maintaining ease of use in tap-to-pay transactions, and improving convenience in contact-based transactions by eliminating the need for PIN entry.

A pilot of the F-Code was launched in Japan in collaboration with domestic credit card company JCB this past spring, and now Societe Generale is introducing the concept to consumers in France. The full scope of the Societe Generale trial, however, is not clear: In a statement, IDEMIA said only that the bank is “experimenting with” and “testing” the solution, and offered no further information about how many users are involved or the project’s timeline.

Nevertheless, it’s another important step forward for IDEMIA and indeed for the nascent biometric payment cards market, which is rapidly emerging as the next major trend in the payments industry. For its part, IDEMIA appears to be attaining an important foothold with this latest development on its home turf in France.

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November 8, 2018 – by Alex Perala