2019 the year of biometric payments

Alastair Johnson, CEO and founder of blockchain-based secure payments and identity verification platform Nuggets believes 2019 will be the year of mainstream biometric payments. Here are his thoughts below –

“2019 will be the year that biometrics payments go mainstream. Consumers are already used to the idea, thanks to payment apps like Apple Pay that use our phones’ biometric scanners. But this is just the start of things to come. Fujitsu and Singapore-based Touché are currently trialling payment terminals that incorporate palm or finger scanning technology, and California’s CaliBurger is testing a system that lets customers serve themselves after linking their faces to loyalty cards.

The race to make shopping more convenient with biometric payments and as friction-less as possible will gather pace. Having to remember passwords and use PINs will become a thing of the past, so too will be having to fill in long online forms to make payments. Credit and debit cards will begin to feel outdated. Major players like Visa and Mastercard are already working hard to bolster our reliance on them, by working on fingerprint scanning cards. But technology is likely to leapfrog plastic cards altogether by enabling our biometrics to be directly linked to our accounts in 2019, allowing purchases to be authorised just by having those biometrics verified.

In 2019, there will be a proliferation of payment apps and wallets launched by brands, like the M&S Payment App & Walmart Pay, but the vast majority won’t get the take-up they need. The industry need a universally accepted payment wallet – for convenience, but also for security.

As consumers’ awareness of the value of their data grows, and data breaches continue at an alarming pace, consumers are more likely to gravitate towards brands and spend their money with retailers who actively go out of their way to protect their data, and save them from sharing details with hundreds of different retailers every year.

The emergence of sovereign biometric payments solutions will be a big story in 2019. These are platforms that allows users to make payments to businesses online or offline without giving that information away to a third party. Advances in the fields of biometric payments, blockchain technology and cryptography will make this possible.”

Of course this has implications for e-commerce transactions and IRL world transactions. In theory it will be easier to buy and checkout in both scenarios. The point made above about consumers giving their business to brands who go out of their way to protect their data, will become ever more important. Brands will need to remind their customers via marketing and CRM that they will protect consumer data.

Amazon shopping is already quite easy but will it be as smooth with biometric payments? The user journey and user interface for bio payments will need to be clearly thought out. Payment solutions on the blockchain will be even more popular simply because of the security. The user experience will be akin to two step authentication and the authenticator app, except instead of entering a code all you will need to do is scan your fingertip.

Nuggets is a consumer blockchain platform giving users a single biometric tool for login, payment and identity verification, without sharing or storing private data. See how this works across desktop and mobile in the video above.

Perhaps, the fact that you accept bio metric payments will be something you want to optimise for search