The Payments Association of South Africa (PASA) has revealed that it has developed a standard for using biometric authentication on payment cards in the country with Visa and Mastercard.According to a report in htxt, the standard will cover palm prints, voice, iris and facial recognition, and is open to other forms of biometric data too. The initial focus is on fingerprint biometrics though.Walter Volker, CEO of PASA, told the online magazine that while banks have been using biometrics to a certain extent, they've been limited to in-branch transactions due to the fact that there is no global standard for biometric data use and storage, and banks are locked into individual vendors who use proprietary systems.”PASA's role is to facilitate interoperability,” Volker says, “Multiple banks can issue cards, and those cards can be used at other banks' ATMs. That's what we mean by interoperabilty and it opens up network effects”.To ensure privacy standards are met, the new standard states that biometric data is not held in a centralised database, rather data is only stored in an encrypted form on the card itself.”The benefits of biometrics are security and convenienceߪ People find keeping passwords secure and up to date difficult,” says Taurai Tarugarira, a senior director at Visa for sub-Saharan Africa. “The reality is that it's harder to forge biometrics.”

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