Juniper Forecasts Rise of Biometric Mobile Payments

A new report from Juniper Research suggests that biometric technology will revolutionize the mobile payments industry over the next few years. The firm predicts that consumers will use biometric authentication to conduct $2.5 trillion in payment transactions on mobile devices by 2024.

That number represents a massive 1,000 percent increase over the comparable $228 billion figure that is projected for the end of 2019. Juniper credits the rapid transformation to the widespread availability of biometric tech on mobile devices. 90 percent of new smartphones are expected to offer some form of biometric security within the forecast period.

“Biometrics has traditionally been used for in-person contactless payments,” said Juniper Researcher and report author James Moar. “However, we anticipate over 60 percent of biometrically-verified payments will be made remotely by 2024.”

Juniper notes that the majority of consumers will not use their phones to make contactless payments, even if they have the option to do so. That largely seems to be a matter of habit, with many people preferring to use contactless payment cards, many of which will soon offer similar biometric security features.

The prevalence of smartphone cameras and biometrics‑as‑a‑service platforms will nevertheless make facial recognition a more popular modality for a variety of payments applications. Juniper also predicts that the lack of support for WebAuthn will hinder the adoption of mobile payments on iOS platforms relative to Android devices, with biometric payments on Android devices growing at double the rate of their iOS counterparts.

The findings are in line with a 2018 Juniper report that found that mobile biometric payments would reach $2 trillion by 2023. The research firm has previously predicted that 2.1 billion consumers will be using mobile wallets before the end of 2019, climbing an astonishing 30 percent from 1.6 billion mobile wallet users in the preceding year.

–

December 3, 2019 – by Eric Weiss