Silicon Valley's endgame? Biometric wallets may be the technology that makes your wallet obsolete:
Aram Sinnreich recently went grocery shopping at a Whole Foods Market in his hometown of Washington, D.C., and realized he had left his wallet at home. He had no cards and no cash, but he had no reason to worry — at least, not about paying for his food. “I used my iPhone to pay, and I unlocked it with my face,” he said.
Companies are refining biometric services After a slow start, the global mobile-payment market is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 33%, reaching $457 billion in 2026, according to market-research firm IT Intelligence Markets. As payments move from cash to credit cards to smartphones, financial-technology companies, known as fintechs, have been honing their biometric services.
Frictionless payments lead to more spending It will make shopping easier for consumers and, if studies on mobile payments provide a barometer, more lucrative for companies. A study carried out by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that the number of actual purchases increased by almost one quarter when people used Alipay mobile payments.
Facial recognition is already widely used Facial recognition has already made its way into financial services. Mastercard MA, -0.24% and Visa V, +0.55% have security features that require people to use their faces to log into their accounts on their phones. Apple’s iPhone X enables people to use “Face ID” to unlock their phones, and Samsung’s SSNLF, +0.00% 005930, +1.31% Galaxy S8 and S8+ has an iris scanner.
In 2017, KPro, a KFC brand in Hangzhou, China, introduced Alipay facial-recognition technology at points of sale. Today, KFC YUM, +0.89% uses its Alipay’s “Smile to Pay” facial recognition technology in more than 700 stores across China. Apple and Samsung have sold tens of millions of devices enabled with fingerprint technology, another relatively easy way for people to provide identification without having to carry a wallet, smartphone or credit card.
How will corporations use biometrics? In 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management said the fingerprint data of 5.6 million people was stolen in two separate cyber attacks. It’s not clear when the first attack happened, but it was discovered in March 2014; the second attack occurred in May 2014 and was discovered in April 2015. Officials said at the time that there was no evidence of abuse but that a counterintelligence problem could emerge in the future.
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