Samsung and Mastercard officially join a credit card with a built-in fingerprint scanner, Samsung announced Thursday. These so-called “biometric cards” will be incorporated with “several key discrete chips” on the side of Samsung and are expected to be compatible with any point of sale (POS) terminal or any terminal that accepts Mastercard chip payments.
Mastercard has been playing with the idea of biometrics since 2017, when the company announced a pilot of a similar sound biometric card that would authenticate payments by having customers place their thumb on a chip embedded within the card. If a person’s PIN number matches the fingerprint associated with the card, payment will be made.
Samsung’s new collaboration, meanwhile, plans to completely eliminate PIN numbers. According to the ad, all someone will need to do to authenticate a payment is put their thumb on one of the chips embedded in the card. The plan is to allow for “safer interactions with reduced physical points of contact,” giving up the need to bother even touching a PIN keyboard.
On the one hand, using these systems means that you rely on Mastercard to keep your biometric data secure. Considering some of the high–Profile stories of the biometric data breaches we’ve been hearing over the last few years, which can be a tough sell-off for some Mastercard customers. But on the other hand, these security risks could be worthwhile for people who want to adopt a contactless form of payment.
Although there are few proofs pointing to contact with the surface, such as between the finger and a PIN keyboard, playing an important role in the transmission of Covid-19 anxieties on contaminated surfaces have led strips of people make the change from paying cash to adopt contactless payment methods, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. And as others have done pointed out, there is a good chance that the popularity of cashless payments will not dissipate soon: in the United States, some researchers predict that the total value of such untouched transactions will skyrocket from $ 178 billion in 2020 to $ 1.5 trillion in 2024.
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Samsung will lead the “gradual” launch of these new biometric cards in South Korea later this year. So far, it is unclear whether the cards will go to any other market.