Study: Payment to get personal

A new study from Juniper Research has found that the increased rollout of contactless payment services using fingerprint scanners will push the number of biometrically authenticated transactions to nearly 5 billion by 2019, up from less than 130 million this year.



The research observed that at present, only two services, Apple Pay and Samsung, used fingerprint scanners for authentication, with availability currently limited to the U.S. and U.K. for the former, and the U.S. and South Korea for the latter.



However, with both services expected to be launched in multiple additional markets during 2016, the convenience of the scanner is likely to make it a primary mechanism for transaction authentication.



However, the research pointed out that the greater prevalence of cybercrime, with more than 1 billion online records exposed by data breaches in 2014, meant that tokenization would be needed to significantly reduce exposure to fraud. Juniper also suggests that widespread use of tokenization could reduce the scale of fraud attacks.