Strong Authentication, Secure Payments.

Dateline: Rotterdam, 13th September 2023.Around three-quarters of American adults say that they are “not at all” comfortable with biometric payments such as the Amazon palm scan. While that is down five percentage points in the last four years, it’s still pretty high. So are Amazon and others wasting their time? I think not.ShareAmazing Amazon OneAmazon has announced that its palm recognition biometric authentication service, Amazon One, will be used for payment, identification, loyalty and entry and more than 500 Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh locations across America by the end of this year.They are not alone in looking at biometric payments. J.P. Morgan also intends to pilot biometrics-based payments using both palm and face identification with select retailers in the U.S. What is particularly appealing about this type of rapid biometric authentication is that it enables a retailer to combine both an authenticated payment transaction and an authenticated loyalty transaction in one “identity ceremony” so that the customer can complete both transactions without needing to present cards, a phone or anything else.In-store biometric payments are not new, by the way. One of the first blog posts I ever wrote, back in 2007, was about trials with fingerprint payments at a number of stores including Piggly Wiggly. I wrote at the time that a key driver for such payments in mass market retail would be convenience, not security, and I also (correctly) predicted that such mass market use would be delayed because of the arrival of contactless payments!Subscribe nowMy reasoning, reinforced with the…Strong Authentication, Secure Payments.