Juniper predicts mobile biometrics will authenticate $2 trillion a year in payments by 2023

Jul 25, 2018 | Stephen Mayhew

Mobile biometrics will be used to authenticate $2 trillion worth of in-store and remote payments annually by 2023, driven by 2,500 percent growth in remote biometric transactions, according to a new study from Juniper Research.

According to the study “Mobile Payment Security: Biometric Authentication & Tokenisation 2018-2023,” payments authorized with mobile biometrics are expected to reach $124 billion this year, with open biometric platforms and initiatives to support secure remote transactions proliferating. Of that total, remote biometric verification was used for 28 percent of payments. That ratio will increase to 57 percent by 2023, however, for a total of 48 billion biometrically verified remote mobile commerce transactions.

Industry standardization initiatives like Visa’s Secure Remote Commerce will drive growth in remote biometric transactions, as will increased integration of biometric hardware in smartphones, according to the research. Juniper predicts that more than 80 percent of smartphones, or just over 5 billion units, will have some form of biometric hardware built-in by 2023. While fingerprint sensors are still the most common form of biometric hardware, facial recognition and iris scanning hardware integration will become more common, exceeding 1 billion devices.

Software “Biometrics-as-a-Service” offerings are the main innovation in the field, however, Juniper says. Software-based facial recognition is supported by 90 percent of current smartphones, and 80 percent can support voice biometrics for payments. These services and behavior tracking technologies will allow cloud services to perform authentication in the background and across platforms, and Juniper estimates more than 1.5 billion smartphones will use software-based biometrics by 2023.

“The possibilities for software-based continuous behavioural biometric authentication are huge,” notes research author James Moar. “The flexible programming allows businesses to deploy any level of authentication they require relatively easily, while ensuring that transactions are properly authenticated.”

The market for the mobile biometrics themselves will reach $49.33 billion by 2022, according to research released earlier this year by Markets & Markets, and the market for payment security software will grow by 16 percent through 2022, according to Technavio.