Mobile biometrics used in $2tn worth of sales

By 2023, mobile biometrics will authenticate $2 trillion in sales per year, according to a new study from Juniper Research.

This is 17 times the $124 billion expected in 2018, as initiatives furthering secure remote payment transactions and more open biometric platforms proliferate.

The research, Mobile Payment Security: Biometric Authentication & Tokenisation 2018-2023, forecasts that the fastest growth will come from biometrically verified remote mCommerce transactions, reaching over 48 billion in volume by 2023. This will be around 57% of all biometric transactions, up from an estimated 28% in 2018.

This growth is expected to be driven both by industry standardisation initiatives, like Visa’s Secure Remote Commerce, and smartphone vendors introducing different forms of biometric authentication.

Juniper anticipates that over 80% of smartphones will have some form of biometric hardware by 2023, representing just over 5 billion smartphones. This has traditionally meant fingerprint sensors, but facial recognition and iris scanning will become more prominent over the next five years, with adoption exceeding 1 billion devices.

Despite this hardware proliferation, Juniper believes the main innovations in mobile biometrics lie with ‘Biometrics as a Service’ — software which employs AI to check users’ identities on any platform.

Juniper’s report estimates that nearly 90% of smartphones currently in use can support software-based facial recognition, while 80% are capable of voice-based payments. Juniper believes that these services, as well as tracking user behaviour, will enable secure cloud-based identity checks that are cross-platform and authenticate in the background. The research forecasts over 1.5 billion smartphones to use software-based biometrics by 2023.

“The possibilities for software-based continuous behavioural biometric authentication are huge,” said research author James Moar.

“The flexible programming allows businesses to deploy any level of authentication they require relatively easily, while ensuring that transactions are properly authenticated.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Tom Wang

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