Juniper Research says biometrics will authenticate over $3 trillion of payment transactions in 2025, from just $404 billion in 2020. The report found that biometrics, including fingerprint, iris, voice and facial recognition are becoming critical to offering compelling app experiences, as mobile payments dominate the payments landscape.
The over 650% growth will be fuelled by increased use of OEM Pays (such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay), for both remote and in-store payments, as these applications have already embraced biometric authentication methods.
Recommendation
The research recommends that all payment apps take notice of biometrics and build the most seamless user experience leveraging biometric capabilities, or risk losing out to more secure OEM Pay alternatives.
Biometric usage lagging behind hardware adoption
The Juniper Research paper, Mobile Payment Security: Key Opportunities, Vendor Strategies & Market Forecasts 2021-2025, found that although biometric capabilities will reach 95% of smartphones globally by 2025, only 35% of these smartphones will be used for making biometric payments in eCommerce in the same year.
It identified that stored card-on-file payments without biometric security remain common in eCommerce, and that it will require significant efforts by stakeholders to transition spend to biometrically-secured methods.
Research co-author Susan Morrow explained that “While biometrics are now an established part of the ecosystem, payments and eCommerce apps have not kept pace with the rate of innovation. Merchants must adopt biometric capabilities rapidly and educate users to best secure the increasingly massive eCommerce market.”
The threat to mobile contactless payments
The research also found that contactless mobile payments are a major driver of increased biometrics use, with the number of contactless mobile transactions secured by biometrics increasing by over 520% between 2020 and 2025.
The research identified contactless cards as the main threat to this, as they do not require the extra verification step, meaning that payment vendors need to incentivise wallet use to drive greater adoption of biometrics.
