Samsung and Mastercard are officially merging into a credit card with an integrated fingerprint reader, Samsung announced On thursday. These so-called “biometric cards” will come integrated with “several important discrete chips” on the part of Samsung and are planned to be compatible with any point of sale (POS) terminal or any terminal that currently accepts Mastercard chip payments.
Mastercard has been playing with the idea of biometrics since 2017, when the company announced a pilot of a similar-sounding biometric card that would authenticate payments by getting customers to 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, plans to end PIN numbers altogether. According to the announcement, all someone needs to do to authenticate a payment is to put their thumb on one of the chips built into the card. The plan is to allow “safer interactions with reduced physical points of contact”, eliminating the need to even bother to touch a disgusting PIN pad.
On the one hand, using these systems means that you are relying on Mastercard to keep your biometric data secure. Considering some of the High–profile stories of biometric data breaches that we’ve heard in recent years, which can be difficult to sell to some of Mastercard’s customers. But, on the other hand, these security risks can be worthwhile for anyone who wants to adopt a contactless payment method.
Despite the fact that there are little evidence point to the contact surface – say, between your finger and a PIN pad – playing an important role in Covid-19 transmission, anxieties contaminated surfaces have led to flocks of people make the switch from cash payment to adoption contactless payment methods, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. And how others have pointed, there is a good chance that the popularity of electronic payments will not dissipate any time soon: in the US, some researchers predict that the total value of these types of contactless transactions will skyrocket from $ 178 billion in 2020 to $ 1.5 trillion in 2024.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Samsung will be leading the “gradual” launch of these new biometric cards in South Korea later this year. So far, it is not clear whether the cards will be launched in other markets.