SiriusXM and Visa Bringing Biometric Payments to the Connected Car

“…the system will use biometric authentication to confirm the payments, with Visa and SiriusXM suggesting in a statement that they’re consider the use of voice recognition and fingerprint scanning through the dashboard’s touchscreen.”

SiriusXM is getting into the payments business, with a Visa partnership aimed at delivering in-car payments to consumers.

Thanks to the companies’ new collaborative effort, car makers who take advantage of SiriusXM’s in-car entertainment systems will be able to integrate new digital commerce services into their vehicles. Customers will be able to use the SiriusXM e-wallet system to find gas stations and make payments from inside the car, to pay tolls, even to purchase movie tickets.

What’s more, the system will use biometric authentication to confirm the payments, with Visa and SiriusXM suggesting in a statement that they’re consider the use of voice recognition and fingerprint scanning through the dashboard’s touchscreen. The aim, the explained, is “to eliminate driver distractions during the transaction.”

The Visa Token Service will provide an additional layer of security to these transactions.

There has been sporadic efforts to explore in-car payments, such as a 2017 collaboration between Jaguar, Shell, and Apple based on the latter’s Apple Pay platform. But given the preponderance of SiriusXM across the automotive sector, and Visa’s stature in the field of financial services, their collaboration could shift things into a much higher gear. They haven’t given a timeline for the launch of their solution, but the companies indicated in their announcement that their “suite of services will be showcased to automobile manufacturers during 2019.”