Biometrics to secure $2.5 trillion in mobile payments by 2024, with WebAuthn standards driving adoption

Biometric Authentication includes Fingerprint, Iris, Voice & Facial Recognition Technologies.

A new report from Juniper Research has found that biometric authentication will be used to secure $2.5 trillion worth of mobile payment transactions by 2024, an increase of almost 1,000% on the $228 billion expected to be transacted through the method by the end of 2019.

For more insights, download Juniper’s free whitepaper, The Impact of Regulation on Securing Mobile Payments.

Generic Hardware Biometrics Driving Awareness, Not Usage

The new research, Mobile Payment Authentication & Data Security: Encryption, Tokenisation, Biometrics 2019-2024, shows that the availability of dedicated biometric hardware will not be an obstacle to biometric usage as it will be present on an estimated 90% of smartphones by 2024. However, we expect less than 30% of these phones to be used to authenticate contactless payments, thanks to the presence of contactless cards.

The report also shows that the use of facial recognition, whether hardware or software-based, is gaining ground on fingerprint-based payment authentication. Juniper Research believes that because of the ubiquity of smartphone cameras and the ability to utilise software-based biometrics‑as‑a‑service platforms, these will reach a similar level of usage to dedicated hardware biometrics over the next 5 years.

Standards to Bring Biometrics to Mobile Browsers

The report notes that there are several payment standards and protocols coming into force in the future that will increase the use of mobile biometrics. Most particularly, 3D Secure 2.0’s requirement for two-factor authentication will drive merchants to adopt biometrics to make the payment experience smoother across a variety of platforms.

“Biometrics has traditionally been used for in-person contactless payments,” remarked research author James Moar. “However, with an increase in the need for smooth authentication on all mCommerce channels, we anticipate over 60% of biometrically-verified payments will be made remotely by 2024.”

However, the report shows this will be mostly confined to Android devices, as iOS does not currently support WebAuthn authentication. Due to this, biometrics’ use for mobile payments on non-iOS devices will grow at double the rate of that of iOS devices.