Biometric authentication for mobile payments to skyrocket 10X to $2.5T by 2024

Biometric authentication will be used in $2.5 trillion in mobile payments by 2024, an increase of nearly 1,000 percent from $228 billion in 2019, driven by the rise of WebAuthn standards adoption, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

The Mobile Payment Authentication & Data Security: Encryption, Tokenisation, Biometrics 2019-2024 report suggests that 90 percent of smartphones will have dedicated biometric hardware by 2024, but less than 30 percent of them to be used to authenticate contactless payments, due to the use of contactless cards.

The report covers tokenization for contactless and remote payments, fingerprint, facial, iris, and voice biometric modalities, considers eight key regions and a dozen important country markets. Hardware and software-based facial recognition are gaining ground on fingerprint authentication for payments, and Juniper believes smartphone biometrics based on cloud software will become as popular as those based on hardware within the next five years.

Several different payment standards will also drive mobile biometrics use, including 3D Secure 2.0, which requires two-factor authentication.

“Biometrics has traditionally been used for in-person contactless payments,” remarks research author James Moar. “However, with an increase in the need for smooth authentication on all mCommerce channels, we anticipate over 60 percent of biometrically-verified payments will be made remotely by 2024.”
Because iOS does not support WebAuthn, the report forecasts mobile payments with biometrics on non-iOS devices are expected to increase at double the rate of iOS device biometric payments.

Earlier this year Goode Intelligence forecast mobile biometric payments to reach $1.67 trillion by 2023, and eBay is an example of a retailer very recently increasing biometric support, though for sign-in.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometric identification  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  Juniper Research  |  mobile payment  |  secure transactions