Social distancing drives demand for a contactless and touchless in-store payment experience. Biometric payment cards meet this need for all transactions, with no spending limits.
Payment cards are well-known items that we use in our daily lives. With the advent of contactless technology, they have progressed significantly in recent years.
Thales has been at the forefront of this shift, assisting banks in their efforts to constantly reinvent the card and provide the best possible payment experience. Users will benefit from the increased security and convenience of this new unique card, which includes a biometric sensor. This latest generation of cards marks a watershed moment in the payment industry.
The contactless biometric card makes proximity payments much easier while also providing an important level of privacy and security. A simple and secure personal enrollment method is used to load the user’s fingerprint data onto the card, which can be done at home or at a bank branch. Furthermore, none of the biometric information used for enrollment is shared with any third parties; the fingerprint on the card’s chip is solely utilised for local authentication of the cardholder while paying contactless. Because biometric data is securely kept in the card’s chip, neither the retailer nor the bank has access to it.
In terms of security, the biometric card means that without the owner’s fingerprint to validate a contactless transaction, a lost or stolen card is useless. There is no need to set a payment limit in such secure payment environments. Furthermore, if the cardholder’s fingerprint cannot be utilised – for example, for ATM cash withdrawals – a PIN code can be used as a fallback method.
Thales’ EMV contactless biometric payment card is the industry’s only solution that has been completely validated by major EMV payment schemes such as MasterCard and Visa. The solution has been commercialized in various countries following a series of successful trials around the world.
“After a trial of the Thales biometric payment card and its positive outcome, we have now opened the offer to all our customers with confidence. This premium solution addresses several challenges such as convenience, safety and contactless. A simple yet rigorous enrollment process has been set in the branch so the biometric data never leaves the card. This is a key pre-requisite as we take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously” said Jean-Marie Dragon, Head Of Payments and Cards, BNP Paribas.
Bertrand Knopf, SVP Banking and Payment Solutions at Thales, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the Tech sector to develop touchless solutions and has indirectly resulted in higher transaction levels being processed without a second authentication factor. The biometric payment card allows contactless payment for any amount while safeguarding the privacy of this very personal data.”