Visa Brings Passkeys to Online Payments in Major FIDO Victory

Visa has brought passkeys to payments, announcing that customers can now authorize payments through a biometric scan on their smartphone or computer when making a purchase online.

That functionality has been enabled through the Visa Payment Passkey Service, which the payments giant has built upon what it describes as its own Fast Identity Online (FIDO) server. Visa’s federated model allows merchants to integrate the Visa Payment Passkey Service into their checkout without having to build their own servers, or integrate it into their tech stack, or do any other heavy lifting.

For consumers, the integration means that they can use the same biometric authentication systems they use to unlock their smartphone or laptop in order to make a Visa payment online. They only need to enroll once at checkout, and Visa says enrollment will be enabled through banking apps in the future.

The passkey concept was primarily developed through a collaboration among major technology companies Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In a sense, the path to passkeys began around 2012 when the FIDO Alliance was formed. The consortium aimed to address the limitations of traditional passwords by developing open standards for stronger authentication, and included biometrics specialists such as HYPR and Nok Nok Labs.

In 2014, FIDO released its first set of standards, which laid the groundwork for passwordless authentication methods. Over the next several years, continuous advancements were made, culminating in the WebAuthn standard in 2019, which was quickly adopted by major browsers. This opened the door to the development of passkeys, leveraging FIDO’s protocols to bind authentication credentials to end users’ mobile biometrics systems.

Now, with Visa’s latest move, major FIDO and passkey proponents are celebrating.

“Just about every single regulated business I’ve talked to in the last year has a passkey initiative on their roadmap,” said HYPR co-founder and CEO Bojan Simic, in an online post. “I’m so proud of the work that we have all done at the FIDO Alliance to make this a reality. When we wrote the first FIDO implementation in 2014 here at HYPR, seeing the top brands adopt the standard in a major way seemed like fantasy.”

In helping to make that fantasy a reality, Visa joins a number of other high-profile companies that have recently announced passkey support, including PayPal, Samsung, and Amazon.

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May 16, 2024 – by Alex Perala