Mobile biometrics to top $1.67trn by 2023

Written by Peter Walker

04/01/19

Goode Intelligence forecasts that over $1.67 trillion of mobile biometric payments will be made annually by 2023 and over $8.7 billion revenue will be generated for suppliers of mobile biometric technology by 2023.

Mobile biometrics have transformed how financial firms identify and authenticate customers, enabling them to dispense with inconvenient technologies that have been shoehorned to work on smart mobile devices.

Its latest report suggested that initial growth in this market is predominantly from remote (digital) payments through a combination of mobile-commerce and e-commerce payment transactions, with the latter supported by FIDO 2.0 web authentication standards.

The research revealed that 2018 saw 68 per cent of biometric payments being made by mobile versus 32 per cent in-store. By 2023, Goode Intelligence predicted the percentage of local mobile biometric payment users will increase to 46 per cent, with remote payments accounting for 54 per cent of total mobile biometric payment users.

Slower rates of adoption are expected for local mobile biometric payments in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, with the highest rates of adoption expected in China, India and rest of the Asia Pacific region.

Alan Goode, founder and chief executive of Goode Intelligence, said that identity verification, authentication and fraud management are the three inter-connected areas where mobile biometrics is really establishing itself as an important tool for banks and payment services providers to deploy.

“The delivery of financial services is being transformed by a series of digital mega-events that include the Open Banking revolution where these banks and payment services providers are being forced, either by regulation such as PSD2, or by pressures from FinTech providers, to open up their digital infrastructure to third parties using APIs,” he commented.

“This, coupled with the need for speed and friction removal from a range of financial services, has created the demand for alternative identity solutions that can operate in a range of channels from traditional, for example ATMs, to the latest digital financial services including mobile, web and the Internet of Things.”

Goode’s opinion was that fingerprint will continue to be a dominant modality due to the wide scale availability of sensors in mobile devices. Face - both 3D sensors embedded by mobile devices like Apple Face ID and software based solutions leveraging cloud-based AI - will also grow rapidly as it supports mobile-based applications to support identity and document verification for digital onboarding.