Samsung and Mastercard officially team up on a credit card with a built-in fingerprint scanner, Samsung has announced on Thursday. These so-called “biometric cards” will be supplied with “several discrete key chips” from Samsung and are planned to be compatible with any point of sale (POS) terminal or any terminal that currently supports Mastercard. chip payments.
Mastercard has played the idea of biometrics since 2017, when the company announced a pilot of a biometric card with similar sounds, which would authenticate payments by the fact that customers place their thumb on a chip embedded inside the card. If a person’s PIN number matches the fingerprint associated with the card, payment will be made.
Samsung’s new collaboration, in turn, intends to completely eliminate PIN numbers. According to the announcement, all someone will have to do to authenticate a payment is to insert their thumb on one of the chips embedded in the card. The plan is to allow “safer interactions with low physical contact points”, giving up the need to bother even touching a PIN pad at all.
On the one hand, using these systems means that you trust Mastercard to keep your biometric data safe. Considering some of the high–profile fairy tales of biometric data breaches that we have heard in recent years, which can be a difficult sale for some of the Mastercard customers. But on the other hand, these security risks could be worthwhile for those who want to adopt a contactless payment method.
Despite the fact that it exists little evidence pointing to the surface contact – such as between your finger and a PIN pad – for example, playing a substantial role in the transmission of Covid-19, anxieties about contaminated surfaces led leaves of people to make the transition from cash payment to adoption contactless payment methodssuch as Apple Pay or Google Pay. And as others have done Highlighted, there is a good chance that the popularity of cashless payments will not dissipate soon: in the US, some researchers predict that the total value of these types of untouched transactions will increase from $ 178 billion in 2020 to $ 1.5 trillion in 2024.
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Samsung will lead the “gradual” launch of these new biometric cards in South Korea later this year. So far, it is unclear whether the books will be released in other markets.