“Buy with your eyes, pay with your glance!”After running pilot tests in Brazil and parts of the Asia Pacific for roughly two years, Mastercard is finally rolling out its biometric retail payments system in Europe. The world’s largest payment card company appears to be determined to wean consumers off not only cash, its eternal rival, but also credit and debit cards, its main line of business until now. To that end, it is piloting its Biometric Checkout Program in Poland in collaboration with local fintech company PayEye, which will be providing its iris and face biometric technology.

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No doubt an interesting technology. Do we want it? Do we need it?
A person with a thick wallet will likely think this development is great, easy and practical, no need to carry around any card or phone or any other payment methods. People who are struggling with budgeting and having expenditure control, we know that using cards remove the sense of spending "pain" and it removes the ability to easily calculate the money use (with cash you literally see how much you have and what leaves you and what you have left). Going biometric payment wipes out that tiny inconvenience of a card or phone pay, I'd say making you blind to your expenditure (except, of course, in hindsight when the account has to be balanced). Sometimes things should not be convenient but hard. Even, or perhaps definitely, when it comes to micro payment, the one Euro here and two Euros there, it all sum up pretty quickly to a large sum. Eye/biometric payment will make this transaction so easy and tempting that one can quickly loose control.

#Fintech #MasterCard #Biometric #Technology #Payment
Mastercard Launches Its Biometric Retail Payment System in Europe, Using Poland As a Testing Ground | naked capitalism