Cash in on selfies
Scan your face to pay your bill
FOR the selfie generation, it might be the perfect way to pay.
MasterCard is testing new technology that lets online shoppers authorise a transaction with a snapshot of their face instead of a password.
‘‘As the world gets increasingly digital, this will be the next wave of technology that will change the consumer experience of shopping digitally,’’ says Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise security solutions for MasterCard. ‘‘It’s all part of our role in making commerce available anywhere, any time, on any digital device.’’
More than 200 employees of First Tech Federal Credit Union in the United States are taking part in a two-month pilot in which they verify who they are with either the scan of a fingerprint or a smartphone selfie. A similar trial is taking place in the Netherlands.
This innovation comes at a time of dramatic change in the electronic payments sector.
Apple Pay lets consumers sign off on a purchase, paid for with a stored credit card, with a fingerprint. And the US is catching up with Europe and other parts of the world by switching users to chip-embedded credit and debit cards.
To use MasterCard’s selfie payment option, a customer would need to download its Identity Check app. Then, if they are buying a product from a merchant that requires their identity to be verified before purchase, they will get a push notification to their mobile device, which opens the app. They then hold up their phone, as if they are taking a selfie, blink ‘‘and you’re done’’, Bhalla says. The blink prevents a criminal from using another person’s photo.
A facial recognition scan converts the buyer’s features into a string of ones and zeros, and that, not your actual picture, is processed.
The security boost MasterCard anticipates from the use of facial verification is necessary, Bhalla says. According to consulting firm Aite, 45 per cent of payment card losses are from online transactions.
Authorising a purchase with a photo cuts out the need for remembering yet another password.
‘‘Within most parts of the world, when you do a digital transaction, you use a password, and that’s a big problem because people can’t remember them,’’ Bhalla says.
A global survey of about 10,000 consumers, commissioned by MasterCard and conducted in August, found that one-third had bailed on an online purchase because they couldn’t recall their password.
If the pilot programmes are successful, MasterCard plans to introduce the face and fingerprint technology to more banks, with the ultimate goal that ‘‘it eventually will be rolled out to everybody’’, Bhalla says.
Such innovations are probably going to become more common, and should go a long way towards better safeguarding consumers’ financial information, says Matt Schulz, senior industry analyst for CreditCards.com.
‘‘Biometrics are likely the future of credit card security,’’ Schulz says. ‘‘They’re a major step in the right direction, because when your face is your password, you can’t forget it, and it’s much harder to steal than a PIN.’’
Selfie pay should prove particularly popular with Millennials, according to James DeBello, chief executive and president of Mitek, a mobile imaging technology company. ‘‘They love the convenience of taking a picture for data capture, and they want to be doing more of it.’’
MasterCard isn’t the only credit card company working on new ways to pay. Visa has developed a technical blueprint to enable the use of fingerprints, a face, palm and other biometrics as verification of a person’s identity for online transactions. MasterCard is also looking at the possibility of voice recognition or even a person’s heartbeat being able to confirm who they are.