Visa sees expanding role of digital ID and passkeys, launches Click to Pay in Hong Kong

Visa with ZA Bank is launching Click to Pay in Hong Kong, with eleven more markets to follow, as it also rolls out Visa Payment Passkey globally.

ZA Bank is a Hong Kong digital bank and is enabling cardholders in Hong Kong to use Visa Click to Pay to complete online transactions in seconds. Click to Pay removes the need to manually enter details such as the 16-digit card number, passwords, or Personal Account Number (PAN).

T.R. Ramachandran, Head of Products and Solutions, Asia Pacific, Visa, commented: “ecommerce in Asia Pacific has been accelerated by mobile phone ownership, digital advancements and connectivity.”

“When Click to Pay is used, and combined with Visa Payment Passkey, consumers can enjoy a seamless checkout experience with just three clicks while merchants will benefit from a quicker checkout time, improved authorisation rates and far lower fraud rates.”

Cardholders are able to set up a Visa Payment Passkey using their mobile device’s biometric capability and use the Passkey for future payment authentication at participating ecommerce sites.

Visa Payment Passkey is in line with a global trend for passkeys. Passkeys rely on biometrics such as a person’s face or fingerprints and are steadily replacing passwords, as the latter is deemed less secure and are, let’s face it, all-too easily forgotten.

Microsoft is arguably the biggest adopter as it steered users towards biometrics and passkeys when it rolled out a new sign-in experience for the one billion users of Windows and other Microsoft services. The UK government is another high profile adopter as it shifts to passkeys.

The Visa Payment Passkey is built to Fast Identity Online (FIDO) standards with the global payments company pushing it as the next step in card not present (CNP) authentication. Visa is rolling it out globally.

FIDO2 is a global standard for strong authentication with a host of technology companies backing it. This standard stores the authentication credential – passkey – locally on the consumer’s device and uses the person’s native device biometric capability or screen lock to authenticate the consumer.

Visa observes expanding role of digital ID

At its Visa Payment Forum in Dallas, the company highlighted advances in payments technologies including digital identity-related payments. For Visa, network tokenization is central to digital identity technology, with nearly half of Visa’s digital transactions now leveraging the technology.

Tokenization is supposed to improve security by masking the original primary account number and can be linked to a specific transaction. Visa said that more than a billion tokens were added in the last quarter.

Visa is a proponent of digital identity and earlier this year set out its stall to partner and work with governments at any stage of their digital identity deployment. In February, it released a white paper “Digital Identity and Payments” that envisioned mobile phone-enabled digital identity credentials and payments.

“Visa’s ongoing work on Payment Passkeys may help facilitate a mutually reinforcing relationship between payments and digital identity that could benefit all stakeholders and end-users,” it read.

Visa sees digital identity as a foundational way for countries to uplift their economies. In another white paper “The Transformational Power of Digital Payments for Governments,” executive chairman of the Visa board, Alfred F. Kelly, introduced the first such white paper published by the Visa Government Solutions team.

Visa argues that digitalization is no longer an optional supplement for the public sector but a “real and urgent imperative.” The payments company is outlining what it calls five key opportunities for the public sector such as automating public procurement and commercial payments, and leveraging payments data for issues including tourism recovery or urban design.

“The digitalization agenda ultimately supports national competitiveness in the global economy,” the white paper claims.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital payments  |  financial services  |  payment passkey  |  Visa