From MarketWatch, September 10:
Ditching credit cards for facial recognition will remove the last physical barrier between our bodies and Corporate America
Aram Sinnreich recently went grocery shopping at a Whole Foods Market in his hometown of Washington, D.C., and realized he had left his wallet at home. He had no cards and no cash, but he had no reason to worry — at least, not about paying for his food. “I used my iPhone to pay, and I unlocked it with my face,” he said.
That’s when it struck him: We are just one small step away from paying with our bodily features alone. With in-store facial-recognition machines, he wouldn’t even need his smartphone. Sinnreich, associate professor of communication studies at American University, said he got a glimpse of the future that day.
Biometric technology is infiltrating every other aspect of our digital lives. Next stop: replacing your wallet.Biometric mobile wallets — payment technologies using our faces, fingerprints or retinas — already exist. Notable technology companies including Apple AAPL, -0.36% and Amazon AMZN, -1.01% await a day when a critical mass of consumers is sufficiently comfortable walking into a store and paying for goods without a card or device, according to Sinnreich, author of “The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property.”
Removing the last physical barrier — smartphones, watches, smart glasses and credit cards — between our bodies and corporate America is the final frontier in mobile payments. “The deeper the tie between the human body and the financial networks, the fewer intimate spaces will be left unconnected to those networks,” Sinnreich said....MUCH MORE (it gets worse)
Companies are refining biometric services
After a slow start, the global mobile-payment market is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 33%, reaching $457 billion in 2026, according to market-research firm IT Intelligence Markets. As payments move from cash to credit cards to smartphones, financial-technology companies, known as fintechs, have been honing their biometric services.
Biometric technology, meanwhile, is infiltrating every other aspect of our digital lives. Juniper Research forecasts that mobile biometrics will authenticate $2 trillion in in-store and remote mobile-payments transactions in 2023, 17 times more than the estimated $124 billion in such transactions last year.
Juniper, a U.K.-based firm that provides research on the global high-tech communications sector, said it expects growth to be driven both by “industry standardization initiatives” like Visa’s Secure Remote Commerce and by the introduction by smartphone vendors of different forms of biometric authentication.
“Using biometrics as a method of payment is going to be pretty popular in the future,” said Hannah Zimmerman, associate attorney with Fey LLC in Leawood, Kan. She said this will be propelled by “the globalization of commerce” and the fact that companies in the U.S. will want to find new ways to facilitate cross-border transactions.
Frictionless payments lead to more spending
It will make shopping easier for consumers and, if studies on mobile payments provide a barometer, more lucrative for companies. A study carried out by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that the number of actual purchases increased by almost one quarter when people used Alipay mobile payments.
The number of purchases increased by 24% when people used Alipay mobile payments.
All of which is reminiscent of a line from Randall "Tex" Cobb on his heavyweight boxing match with world champion Larry Holmes, every round of which went to Holmes ("Larry Holmes didn't beat me — he just won the first 15 rounds"):
"Well, I stuck to my game plan and led with my face."He also said, about the first time Holmes knocked him down"
"When I got up I stuck to my plan… stumbling forward and getting hit in the face"One more Cobbism:
When a reporter said Cobb was a fat cocaine snorting drunk
"I’m not fat."—Randall “Tex” CobbThose were from "Just One-Liners"
Here's the face:
