Increasing usage of Apple Pay will encourage growth of payments authenticated by biometric security to a value of $5 billion in transactions by 2019, according to British research group Juniper.The findings were released as part of a new report, “Mobile Identity, Authentication & Tokenisation 2015-2020″, which also stated that Apple Inc. and Samsung will account for $130 million in transactions that year, primarily in the United States, United Kingdom and South Korea.Currently, these are the only companies using fingerprint security for transactions on a broad scale. But the report argued that incorporation into additional mobile wallets would be spurred by a greater availability of fingerprint scanners in mid-range smartphones.However, there were also warnings over maintaining the sanctity of biometric data in the report.”When a password or PIN is hacked, the consumer can simply get a replacement,” said Windsor Holden, author of the research study, in a statement. “When biometric data-fingerprint, iris [scans], facial [telemetry]-is stolen, the consumer's online identity could be irretrievably compromised.”The research pointed out that the greater prevalence of cybercrime – more than 1 billion online records were exposed by data breaches in 2014 – meant that tokenisation was becoming an increasingly attractive proposition for acquirers and processors.It argued that the tokenisation process – wherein data with no intrinsic value replaces high value cardholder data – would significantly reduce exposure to fraud. Furthermore, with hackers merely obtaining tokens which are meaningless in isolation, the scale of attacks on sites might also decline.
Apple Pay to drive biometric transactions 'to $5 bn by 2019’
