Once upon a time, making a payment with a little plastic card was seen as the height of convenience. Now you can leave that at home and pay with your phone – and before long, you might not even need that.
Biometric payment technology automatically identifies people from their face, fingerprint or any other unique physical characteristic. It isn’t a new concept: such data has been used as an identification method since the development of fingerprint analysis for criminal investigations in the 19th century. In fact, there is evidence that fingerprints were used to seal business contracts thousands of years ago in ancient Babylon, although it’s unlikely that they understood that a print was unique to a particular person.
But technology has massively expanded the potential of biometric verification. Whereas fingerprint matching once occurred in specialist labs, it’s become something that mobile phones do for many of us several times a day – and that’s not even counting other techniques, such as facial recognition or iris scanning.