Biometrics to secure over USD 3 trillion in mobile payments by 2025: Study

Biometrics will authenticate over USD 3 trillion of payment transactions in 2025, from just USD 404 billion in 2020, according to Juniper Research’s study, titled Mobile Payment Security: Key Opportunities, Vendor Strategies & Market Forecasts 2021-2025. The study found that biometrics, including fingerprint, iris, voice and facial recognition are becoming critical to offering compelling app experiences, as mobile payments dominate the payments landscape. The extraordinary growth of over 650% will be fuelled by increased use of OEM Pays (such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay), for both remote and in-store payments, as these applications have already embraced biometric authentication methods.
 
The study recommends that all payment apps take notice of biometrics and build the most seamless user experience leveraging biometric capabilities, or risk losing out to more secure OEM Pay alternatives.

Biometric Usage Lagging Behind Hardware Adoption

The study found that although biometric capabilities will reach 95% of smartphones globally by 2025, only 35% of these smartphones will be used for making biometric payments in e-commerce in the same year. The research identified that stored card-on-file payments without biometric security remain common in e-commerce, and that it will require significant efforts by stakeholders to transition spend to biometrically-secured methods.

Research co-author Susan Morrow explains: ‘While biometrics are now an established part of the ecosystem, payments and e-commerce apps have not kept pace with the rate of innovation. Merchants must adopt biometric capabilities rapidly and educate users to best secure the increasingly massive e-commerce market.’

Contactless Payments Driving Biometrics Use, but Card a Limiting Factor

The research also found that contactless mobile payments are a major driver of increased biometrics use, with the number of contactless mobile transactions secured by biometrics increasing by over 520% between 2020 and 2025. The research identified contactless cards as the main threat to this, as they do not require the extra verification step, meaning that payment vendors need to incentivize wallet use to drive greater adoption of biometrics.