Is there still an opportunity for biometric payment cards?

By Alan Goode, CEO and Chief Analyst at Goode Intelligence

Biometrics has had a significant impact on payments, allowing secure and frictionless payment experiences on all payment channels, even enabling new channels to be supported.

The pay-by-me revolution is steadily replacing phishable PINs and passwords with easy-to-use, and not forgettable, inherence factors that are supported by regulation and global standards.

One area of biometric payments that has seen mixed fortunes is biometric payment cards. Biometric payment cards operate in the same way as normal smartcards apart from the user having to activate the card using their enrolled fingerprint, thus replacing the PIN.

There is a match between the person’s finger and a fingerprint template stored on the card. If the match is successful, then the card is activated, and the customer can use the card at a payment terminal. If the match is unsuccessful, then the card cannot be used. This means that the card is useless without the presence of the legitimate owner and if the card is lost or stolen then cannot be used. Payment card vendors are creating ISO 7810 compliant contact and contactless cards that can be adopted by banks to replace non-biometric smartcards.

Biometric payment cards – high expectations not met

As an analyst company that has been active in biometric payments for over 10 years, Goode Intelligence, and many other analyst companies, has previously been bullish on the prospects for biometric payment cards believing that a combination of strong consumer demand, consequences of COVID-19 to hygiene control in physical spaces (avoid touching a PIN PAD), and a move towards biometrics being the defacto payment authentication mechanism would lead to high levels of adoption. However, high levels of adoption have not materialized and Goode Intelligence has published more conservative forecasts for this technology in the recently published market analyst and forecast report on biometric payments published in January 2025 and updated in July 2025.

A very small percentage of the billions of payment cards that are shipped each year around the world are biometric-capable and many companies that developed technology for biometric payment cards are now struggling to survive, having to change tack to other markets and applications including physical access control.

Start-up businesses that grew on the back of the expected demand for biometric payment cards have struggled, with some going out of business. Zwipe, a leading biometric payment card component vendor, went bankrupt in March 2025 after acquiring tens of millions of dollars of investment. IDEX Biometrics has been heavily focused on developing fingerprint sensors designed for smartcards and has also struggled with low market demand for payment cards. In March 2025, the company cancelled an order with Zwipe, pushing them into financial trouble, and refocused their strategy for the access control market with a new CEO taking control. Fingerprint Cards also heavily invested in the prospect of biometric payment cards being a significant revenue stream to counteract reduced revenue from its mobile product line.

So why have biometric payment cards not been as successful as originally thought and is there still a market for them?

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic

A lot of the bullish sentiment for biometric payment cards stems from the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020-2021. During the pandemic, there were obvious concerns about hygiene with people wearing masks and gloves, avoiding touching door handles and for payments, avoiding touching payment PIN pads (both POS and ATM). There was obviously touch-free options such as contactless payment cards and the emergence of mobile wallets. With payment cards, consumers were, and in many cases still, restricted to making contactless payments up to a certain financial limit. Payment regulators reacted by increasing the limits to enable consumers to pay for more expensive in-store items and thus reducing the risk of touching a shared-surface. Biometric payments cards solve this dilemma by supporting higher-value physical payments without touching a shared touchscreen or PIN pad. No need to enter in a PIN on a shared device, just touch your own card with your enrolled finger.

A question of right product, wrong time?

Unfortunately, a combination of high production costs, certification delays, and enrolment challenges meant that biometric payment cards were not available to meet the demands seen during the pandemic. Since the end of lockdown, much of the dynamics created by the pandemic have changed. It is less important that I don’t touch a shared touchscreen or PIN pad and other payment methods are available that are as secure and more cost-effective than biometric payment cards.

For Biometric payment cards to be successful, card issuers need to buy into the idea that biometric payment cards are viable. Biometric payment card viability includes:

• Meeting stringent payment scheme card certification
• Being cost effective and not too expensive (pilot cards are in the region of $20.00-$25.00)
• Having a reliable, scalable and cost-effective enrolment process
• Having biometric sensors that are inexpensive, have low power consumption, meet certification criteria and are accurate

Competition

According to the Worldpay Global Payments Report (GPR) 2024, cards and mobile wallets dominate the physical payment space with 50 percent cards and 30 percent mobile wallets in 2023. By 2027, mobile wallets use in physical scenarios will increase to 46 percent. In addition to these solutions, touchless biometric solutions, where biometric sensors integrated into POS devices authenticate payment users, are emerging with important offerings from Amazon and J. P. Morgan in the US and Alipay and WePay in China. Goode Intelligence forecasts that by 2030, there will be over one billion payment transactions made using touchless biometric solutions.

The future for biometric payment cards

This is not to say that there is zero market for biometric payment cards. There is adoption and we are moving out of the pilot phase into production, albeit on a smaller scale than forecast in the early 2020s. In 2025, the focus on premium segments is a priority for the biometric payment card ecosystem, particularly in developing regions such as Bangladesh where in July, Eastern Bank (EBL) and Mastercard launched a metal biometric payment card using a fingerprint sensor supplied by IDEX Biometrics targeting the banks’ premium segment. These premium users will also have an Apple or Google Payment Wallet and will choose to use the biometric payment card to fit different scenarios and situations.

There is also activity in Turkey, India, South America, Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. In Colombia, banks are turning to biometric payment cards to reduce rampant card fraud in the region, a country where there is low EMV Chip and PIN adoption and a reliance on signatures for authentication.

Does physical access control offer a lifeline for biometric cards?

Biometrics is increasingly being used for physical access control and there is an opportunity for biometric payment cards to be included to the solutions available. Card-based access control currently dominates the market and biometric cards can easily be added to the existing infrastructure without further capital outlay by existing users. However, the dynamics affecting the use of biometric cards for payments also applies to physical access control in that cards are more expensive and you still need to have a reliable and cost-effective enrolment method. Biometric cards do offer enhanced security over normal access control cards in that only legitimate owners of the card can use them, as opposed to lending a standard card to a friend or colleague, or it be lost / stolen and used by an unauthorized user. This is an important consideration for higher assurance scenarios, such as access to secure areas, and could lead to demand for biometric cards. Goode Intelligence is currently investigating the market for biometric physical access cards in a new report due for publication in September.

Summary

Biometric payment cards provide card issuers with a highly-secure alternative to other payment methods, including standard chip-based payment cards. They are part of the available payment methods that are available to card issuers but due to cost and operational challenges will not replace standard cards and be shipped in high volumes. Market conditions currently support a more modest opportunity for biometric payment cards supporting niche and premium scenarios.

Biometrics will continue to be an important technology for the payment industry, supporting the end-to-end payment process from account opening (onboarding through identity verification), transacting, and fraud prevention and detection.

Biometric cards can be leveraged for other sectors and applications with the industry currently focusing on access control.

About the author

Alan Goode is CEO and Chief Analyst at Goode Intelligence. Reach out via LinkedIn to discuss this article.

Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  Goode Intelligence  |  Idex Biometrics