Thales Brings Biometric Payment Cards to Poland

Biometric payment cards have now arrived in Poland, thanks to a collaboration between Thales, Mastercard, and Bank Pocztowy. The latter is now offering a fingerprint-scanning card to its corporate customers, who will be able to biometrically authorize payments with no cap on the amount of money being processed in a given transaction.

The rollout officially began on December 20, after a five-month development effort that also involved Fiserv Polska S.A. In a statement announcing the launch, Thales asserted that it developed the biometric card and is also responsible for its packaging and distribution.

The Polish launch comes after Thales brought its biometric card to the Middle East in the autumn of 2021, in partnership with Mastercard and Jordan Kuwait Bank. Thales has previously developed biometric cards featuring fingerprint sensor technology from Fingerprint Cards, but Thales has made no such connection explicit in these latest announcements of its card launches.

In its Bank Pocztowy announcement, Thales noted that card payments account for 62 percent of all transactions in Poland, and highlighted the security of its biometric solution, which enables contactless transactions with no need for a PIN. The company asserted that its biometric solution “makes it impossible for a third party to use the card,” adding that users’ biometric data is stored on the card and never communicated to an external server, POS terminal, or ATM.

Bank Pocztowy will promote the new card to small and medium-sized enterprises this month, and plans to further extend the offering to additional customers going forward.

Marcin Ledworowski, a member of Bank Pocztowy’s Board for Business and IT, asserted that the collaboration with Thales and Mastercard “allows us to reach further milestones on the way to digitalization of the banking sector and enables customers to benefit from the solutions that are convenient and innovative, yet secure,” adding, “We are looking forward to continuing the project so that the biometric card could also be used by our individual customers.”

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January 3, 2022 – by Alex Perala