Mastercard experimenting with palm print biometrics on smartphones in digital shift

The decision to drop its name from its logo is part of a desire to be seen as more of a fintech firm on the part of Mastercard, and as such is related to the company’s increased focus on biometrics, according to Business Insider.

The company unveiled Mastercard Track Business Payment Services and a partnership with blockchain software company R3 at a recent technology showcase at the New York Stock Exchange. Mastercard Track provides a central payment platform to simplify and digitize business-to-business payments, while the partnership with R3 may be intended to provide something similar to the B2B Connect platform for cross border B2B transactions by Visa last year, Business Insider suggests.

R3 partnered with Gemalto last year on a self-sovereign digital ID project.

Mastercard has also partnered with several other companies on biometrics and digital identification for payments, including Apple.

“It’s a B2B2C business,” Mastercard North America President Craig Vosburg told Business Insider. “We’re partnering with the B’s in the middle.”

“Behind the scenes, payments is very complicated,” Vosburg says.

Mastercard showed off its biometric smart cards at the event, and also its experiments with biometric authentication using a photograph of the user’s palm taken on a smartphone. Because it does not rely on a dedicated hardware feature, Mastercard believes it could be more widely accessible than fingerprint authentication.

The company also demonstrated a system using QR codes to track product supply chains to give businesses and consumers improved transparency.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometric cards  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fintech  |  Mastercard  |  palm biometrics  |  palm prints  |  research and development  |  smartphones