Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 21 | Page 57

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// FEATURE: PHYSICAL SECURITY customers to pay securely, is Wirecard. The company is a global innovation leader for digital financial technology and is reinforcing its position as a pioneer and trendsetter for cashless shopping solutions. Wirecard is introducing a smart payment terminal at which consumers can pay by scanning their palm. The new prototype will expand Wirecard’s portfolio in the area of biometric payments and enable fast, convenient payments without any further proprietary infrastructure. This method will be able to replace traditional cash registers in the future. Wirecard is thus complementing its facial recognition-based IoT shelf launched in 2018, and is once again showing what the shopping and payment experience could look like in the future. The new solution is not only suitable for use in the retail industry but is also ideal for admissions at events such as music festivals and sports events, or in the mobility sector including public transport or at the airport. Consumers experience a seamless, digital payment and shopping experience and can even leave their smartphones or wallets at home, ensuring a secure payment experience. According to recent international research conducted by Oxford University in collaboration with Mastercard, the vast majority of consumers (93%) prefer biometrics over passwords for validating a payment. Jörn Leogrande, Executive Vice President of Wirecard Labs, said: “At Wirecard, we strongly believe that biometrics will follow smartphones as a major means of payment and replace passwords in the future. With Stephen Carney, Vice President of Product Marketing, Physical Access Control Solutions with HID Global www.intelligentcio.com the new palm scanner, the advantages for consumers are clear – the scanner is fast, simple and extremely secure due to the uniqueness of everyone’s palm. We want to shape the future of the retail industry and consumer experience, and for this reason are already developing tomorrow’s technologies today.” The Smart Biometrics solution works by allowing registered customers to place their palms on the biometric scanner for identification. This triggers a real-time payment via the digital Wirecard Financial Commerce Platform. Biometrics solutions for payment security are seemingly becoming more and more common. Computop, the global payment processor, has announced Biometrics by Computop, its new PSD2 compliant biometric authentication service for online merchants and banks. With Biometrics by Computop, merchants can take over the strong customer authentication (SCA) in order to avoid banks having to run their own two factor authentication during the payment process. Computop’s biometric authentication service complies with the secure FIDO standard (Fast Identity Online) and is suitable for PSD2 compliant strong customer authentication in online retail. PSD2, Visa and MasterCard all allow customer authentication to be trusted to third parties. Computop Biometrics enables merchants to process the biometric authentication of their customers in advance, avoiding the necessity for banks to apply their own two factor authentication (2FA) during the sensitive payment process. Smartphone users typically opt for safe and convenient biometric authentication using fingerprint, face or voice recognition. FIDO compliant Biometrics by Computop enables merchants to apply biometric authentication at an early stage in the shopping process when customers are logging into the merchant’s app or online store or during the checkout process. Following this, Computop Biometrics generates a digital signature that can be transmitted to issuers together with other 3D Secure 2.0 data as proof that the merchant has already applied PSD2- compliant strong customer authentication. Running strong customer authentication in advance allows merchants to avert any problems associated with 2FA during the payment process which helps to improve conversion. Computop is already implementing that process with a number of significant retailers. “What we are providing with Computop Biometrics is a host of great advantages for retailers. Biometric authentication can be applied to app or shop logins in order to avoid fraudulent account takeovers. This also helps the customer experience, because biometric authentication is so much better than a typical PIN-TAN process,” said Ralf Gladis, CEO at Computop. “For merchants, there is increased complexity with the number of different authentication methods used by banks, but if they are able to process strong consumer authentication themselves, the customer journey will be standardised and easier to support. In addition, the whole process is GDPR-compliant and consumers can be confident in knowing that biometric data will never leave their own device. Computop’s solution will verify cryptographic keys but will never touch cryptographic data.” n INTELLIGENTCIO 57