Mastercard Launches 'Wave To Pay' Programme

Mastercard is launching a "controversial" biometric payments programme in stores, as the card company tries to keep pace with nimble fintechs and bigger competitors such as Amazon. From a report: Retailers that sign up to its pilot scheme can allow customers to pay in-store with a gesture such as a smile or a wave. The system, which requires customers to enrol first, could also be connected to loyalty programmes and purchase history. "Payments is a wide space, and we are trying to offer what customers want," Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence, told the Financial Times. He said that Mastercard could act as the "enabler of the ecosystem," setting unified privacy and security standards for a technology that has raised the hackles of privacy and data protection campaigners. "It's important that we make sure that data is handled properly and the transaction is safe," said Bhalla. "Everything is done with consumer consent." The facial recognition software itself will come from companies including Japan's NEC, Brazil's Payface and California-based PopID. The first pilots are launching this week at five supermarkets run by the St Marche chain in Brazil. The ambition is to eventually allow consumers to use a single enrolment to pay across different stores, says Bhalla, with further pilots planned across regions including Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.