Mastercard"s selfie pay to strengthen online security

As credit card fraud grows increasingly more sophisticated, at least one card issuers is seeking to make security simpler. Mastercard now urges you to “scan your face to pay your bill.”

Kiss those pins and passwords goodbye because Mastercard has introduced selfie pay, a biometric authentication app that makes your payments based on facial recognition. After some successful trials in Canada, the US and the Netherlands, the app is coming to Europe for further testing in 12 countries.

“We want to identify people for who they are, not what they remember,” said Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Safety and Security at MasterCard.

The company believes this revolutionary idea will help shoppers make transactions faster and will strengthen the security of their payments. The process is very easy. It”s not enough to take a picture of the person making the payment, because blinking is also required to authorize the transaction to prevent someone from using a photo instead of a real-live face.

Basing their prototype on the concept that it”s difficult for users to remember a zillion passwords, Mastercard thinks this can be a real help, but probably still has to work on that risk management strategy. Let”s not forget that, as technology evolves, innovation is driven in the crime world as well.

Ideally, this program would allow users to make as many consecutive payments as desired, but chances of completely getting rid of financial fraud are low. To expand the initiative, Mastercard will also experiment with voice recognition and cardiac rhythm through a wristband to confirm payments. Hopefully, they will come up with some sort of fraud detection software, as well.