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Fingerprints to replace chip-and-PIN cards

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 27 Jul 2016
MasterCard and VISA worked with SA's payments regulator to come up with a biometrics interoperable standard.
MasterCard and VISA worked with SA's payments regulator to come up with a biometrics interoperable standard.

Forgetting a bank card PIN may soon be a concern of the past with a new biometrics standard introduced by South African regulators this week.

The Payments Association of South Africa (PASA), together with VISA and MasterCard, announced a new interoperable specification to facilitate biometric authentication on payment cards.

This means a card issued at one bank, with specific biometrics, will work at another's ATM and merchants, with the same biometrics.

PASA CEO Walter Volker said this was not possible in the past because biometrics systems were largely proprietary and locked to a specific vendor.

"Through this interoperable biometric verification standard in South Africa, we can connect a complicated web of players who operate with different rules and technologies," says Mark Elliott, division president for MasterCard SA.

The standard is a world-first and Volker aspires for it to be taken globally.

The specification enables a range of biometric solutions, from fingerprint verification to palm, voice, iris, or facial biometrics. However, at the moment, it will only include fingerprint authentication.

Payments authentication has progressed from signatures to PINs, to chip-and-PIN cards, which are largely standard now. Volker says fingerprints are next as they are more secure and convenient.

Still optional

PASA says it has no plans to mandate the standard yet and it will be voluntary for banks and vendors to adopt.

No major banks in SA plan to migrate at this stage, although many do make use of biometrics in-house.

For it to roll-out country-wide, there needs to be adoption from all banks, which will have to reissue bank cards and upgrade technology.

Volker says it will be enforced when it gets to a point when there is large-scale deployment.

Bob Reany, global executive VP for identity solutions at MasterCard, believes the first biometrics payment could happen as early as this year, because there are smaller players in this market that want to innovate to be seen as "cool".

There will still be a PIN option to pay where legacy hardware is still being used and biometrics authentication is not an option.

The architecture MasterCard and Visa designed enables fingerprints to be securely accepted by a biometric reader, encrypted, and then validated. It is based on chip technology.

Reany says this will prevent future fraud, as there is no large central database of passwords that a criminal could access through a backdoor. The 'passwords' (a consumer's fingerprint) are decentralised and saved on the user's bank card chip only.

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