MasterCard Announces New Selfie, Fingerprint Payments Feature

MasterCard has already given their cardholders several ways to use their phones to make payments. For one, they generally aren’t secrets: Your face is probably plastered all over social media profiles and captured by many different surveillance cameras every day while you leave fingerprints on nearly everything you touch. For everything else, there’s MasterCard’s selfie payments system.

Biometrics represents the cutting edge of electronic payments-using unique personal characteristics as the ultimate security.

MasterCard, which made its announcement on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, joins other big firms including Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in experimenting with facial recognition technology.

If you want to use your pic to pay, download the Mastercard identity check app. It has you take a selfie each time you purchase something online.

In a few months, you should be able to verify your identity when shopping online by taking a selfie or scanning your fingerprint. Users will have to blink to prove that they’re not holding a photograph in front of the camera, and MasterCard says its algorithms can tell when someone is trying to fool the system by using a video.

In addition to traditional passwords, Mastercard is also working on the development of iris, voice and heartbeat authentication systems. People use something easy for them to remember, like their birthday, not realizing this makes it easy to figure out what your password is with some basic information. Instead of entering a password, the feature allowed users to log in using a fingerprint.

News of MasterCard’s upcoming authentication technologies comes less than a week after news that London-based bank HSBC launched fingerprint and voice recognition services to replace passwords for mobile banking customers in the UK. The technology was also tested in a pilot in the Netherlands. But on occasion, Mastercard may ask for a password when it suspects a fraudulent transaction.