Since Covid, we have gotten into the habit of paying contactless, by card or by mobile. Payment specialists continue to look for even lighter, faster and more secure ways to pay for purchases. Among the most promising avenues, using the palm of the hand.
It is, like teleworking, the use of e-commerce or wearing a mask in public places, one of the small revolutions triggered in France by the Covid crisis. During and since the pandemic, consumers, long reluctant because they were worried about the security of their bank accounts, have massively adopting contactless payment methods to pay for their purchases in stores: the bank card and, increasingly, the smartphone.
However, we have not yet reached the end of this transformation. Specialized companies continue to work on ways to further simplify the act of purchasingthanks in particular to the use of biometric authentication.
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The palm of the hand rather than fingerprint or facial recognition
One of the most promising avenues lies in using the palm of the hand. Ingenico is one of the players currently working on this palm payment and hopes to deploy it in the coming years in Europe, as is beginning to be the case in the United States or China.
Why the palm of the hand rather than the fingerprint or the shape of the face, used in particular to unlock our mobile phones? According to specialists, it would be the most effective biometric factor for paying, the safest too, and therefore the most reassuring. This biometrics is experienced by consumers in a less intrusive way, explains Michel Lger, CTO of Ingenico, in a recent video produced by The Parisian. When you pay with the palm of your hand, you make a gesture, exactly like you do with a card. We control the triggering of payment.
A way to speed up payments
Although the deployment of this solution is not for tomorrow, the technology is already ready. It is based on a infrared sensor coupled with an electronic payment terminal (TPE), capable of reading the network of blood vessels, each specific, which runs through the palm of the hand. Beforehand, the consumer must go through an enrollment phase, during which they scan their palm on a dedicated reader and associate their personal and banking details with the biometric factor.
Palm payment is obviously not intended to systematically replace other means of payment, plastic bank cards in particular. It nevertheless has something to interest certain merchants confronted with the imperative ofspeed up payments to streamline checkout: in supermarkets in particular, but also in transport networks, concerts and festivals or even amusement parks.
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