Mobile payments shifting to software-based biometrics

The biggest shift in mobile payments security over the next five years will be toward software-based biometrics, according to Juniper Research. A new report from the U.K.-based research and analytics firm predicts smartphone users relying on biometric security will balloon by 250 percent between now and 2023, when the total will exceed 1.5 billion users worldwide.

"Mobile payments security will broaden hugely thanks to the implementation of pure software solutions," said James Moar, author of the report. "The key battle will now be to convince users, particularly those in Europe and North America, that these methods are just as secure as traditional hardware-based security."

The report is titled Mobile Payment Security: Biometric Authentication and Tokenization, 2018-2023. Password-based security solutions are seen as increasingly impractical, and insecure, as evidenced by growing reliance on biometric technologies for smartphone security, such as fingerprint, voice and facial recognition. Of these three methods, voice and facial recognition will chart the greatest growth, Juniper said, pointing to the proliferation of smartphones like the iPhone X that support facial and eye-based recognition.

This new trend is hardware-agnostic authentication and will drive increases in biometrically authenticated POS transactions at a global rate of 76 percent as year, Jupiter said. The biggest growth spurts are apt to occur in Asia, whereas North American growth will lag at about 46 percent a year.

Juniper also said that as voice and facial recognition adoption grow, it expects fingerprint sensors to decline in popularity, representing just 90 percent of smartphones in 2023, down from an estimated 95 percent this year.

Editorial Note:

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