Visa Inc. has developed a card-protection feature that makes use of palm, voice, iris, or facial biometrics to verify EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) chip card transactions.
Visa Senior Vice President and Head of Risk Products and Business Intelligence Mark Nelsen said this first-of-its-kind technology is designed to work with the EMV chip industry standard to help ensure open and globally interoperable solutions.
He said the biometric cardholder verification process can be seamlessly integrated with the technology used by 3.3 billion chip cards around the world.
“There is increasing demand for biometrics as a more convenient and secure alternative to signatures or PINs, especially as biometric technologies have become more reliable and available,” he said.
Biometric verification is intended to prevent fraud, as well as make it easier to pay securely. Visa enables fingerprints to be securely accepted by a biometric reader, encrypted, and then validated.
“However, to ensure widespread adoption, it is equally important that solutions are scalable and based on open standards. Building on the EMV chip standard provides a common, interoperable foundation, as well as encourages innovation in cutting-edge biometric solutions,” he added.
The specification supports match-on-card authentication where the biometric is validated by the EMV chip card and is not exposed or stored in any central database. Issuers can optionally validate the biometric data within their secure systems for transactions occurring in their own environments, such as their own automated teller machines.
Visa said there is strong interest in biometric solutions in South Africa and other developing countries where banking and electronic payments may still be nascent. The technology will be tested in Absa Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barclays Africa Group. Cardholders will use fingerprint readers at select Absa-owned ATMs in lieu of a PIN to complete the transactions.