Samsung and Mastercard are officially working together on a credit card with a built-in fingerprint scanner, Samsung announced on Thursday. These so-called “biometric cards” will be baked in with “several key discrete chips” from Samsung, and are planned to be compatible with any point of sale (POS) terminal or 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 biometric card that would verify payments by letting customers place their thumb on a built-in chip in the card. If a person’s PIN matches the fingerprint associated with the card, the payment will be made.
The new Samsung partnership plans to do away with PINs completely. According to the announcement, someone simply has to put their thumb on one of the chips built into the card to verify a payment. The plan is to enable “safer interactions with reduced physical contact points” by even going through the trouble of even touching an icky PIN pad.
On the one hand, using these systems means you trust Mastercard to keep your biometric data safe. Given some of the highprofile stories From biometric data breaches we’ve heard of over the years, that can be difficult for some Mastercard customers. But then again, those security risks can be worth it for those looking for a contactless payment method.
Despite the fact that there are little evidence pointing to surface contact – such as between your finger and a pin code, for example – and plays an important role in sending Covid-19, fears over contaminated surfaces swaths of people to make the shift from paying with cash to adopting contactless payment methods, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. And as others have done pointed out, chances are that the popularity of cashless payments will not disappear anytime soon: in the US, some researchers to predict that the total value of these types of contactless transactions will skyrocket from $ 178 billion in 2020 to $ 1.5 trillion by 2024
G / O Media can receive a commission
Samsung will lead the “gradual” rollout of these new biometric cards in South Korea later this year. So far it is not clear whether the cards will appear in other markets.