Trust Stamp tokenized biometrics for Mastercard financial inclusion initiative

Mastercard has chosen Trust Stamp to provide biometric privacy technology for its African financial inclusion initiative with Paycode.

The Mastercard Inclusive Identity initiative is intended to serve 30 million people, and will utilize Trust Stamp technology to convert biometric data into Irreversibly Transformed Identity Tokens (IT2), which are then used to perform authentication. Biometric templates are therefore not stored or shared anywhere in the system.

The initiative, which brings together the payments giant with two graduates of its Start Path accelerator program, seeks to issue smart cards with embedded face and palm biometrics data through the Mastercard Community Pass platform.

The biometric tokenization approach also offers revocability and granular control at the consumer or issuer level, Trust Stamp says.

The privacy protections afforded by IT2 is important to large-scale implementations of biometrics because it eliminates the value of the stored data outside of the enrolled network, which reduces the risk of biometric data being breached or misused, according to the announcement.

The current implementation utilizes Trust Stamp’s face biometric technology, which the company says is resistant to spoofs, but IT2 architecture can also support contactless multi-modal biometrics with palm recognition.

“Revocable biometric tokens often came across as computationally expensive, requiring network connectivity to operate, or may have poor user experience. The Mastercard/Paycode use case demonstrates that the large-scale database deduplication required to support user enrollment in the field is both feasible and efficient using IT2 tokens, which are both compact and secure,” explains Trust Stamp Chief Science Officer Dr. Norman Poh.

“The technology is designed to work in the low or no connectivity environments that are often characteristic of last-mile service delivery, with no need for sophisticated infrastructure or dedicated biometric capture devices,” he continues. “Any standard camera-enabled mobile phone or tablet turns into an acceptance device. Additionally, multi-modal IT2 fusion increases system accuracy and enables the solution to cover populations who may be restricted as to the biometric modalities they can provide, thus ensuring technology inclusion.”

Poh recently explained the privacy-preserving method of biometric authentication with fuzzy tokens in a recent EAB webinar.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometric cards  |  biometric data  |  biometric enrollment  |  data protection  |  financial inclusion  |  Mastercard  |  Mastercard Community Pass  |  Paycode  |  privacy  |  tokenization  |  Trust Stamp