As many as 2.5m biometric payment cards will be issued during 2021, according to an ABI Research forecast, with more than 20 biometric payment card pilots already underway across the globe.

“The biometric payment card is viewed as the next-generation evolutionary card form factor to help enhance contactless authentication,” ABI explains. It adds that “significant ecosystem efforts, tailored specifically to help reduce product cost, improve yield and simplify manufacturing processes” will contribute to an increase in biometric payment card issuance.

“Higher contactless transaction limits are here to stay and could be considered a significant signal of intent that contactless will ultimately become the de facto digital payment type of the future,” says ABI Research’s Phil Sealy.

“This lends itself extremely well to innovative card form factors, such as the biometric payment card, designed to bring strong customer authentication to address the growing presence of card present contactless fraud, but also privacy, thanks to a biometric match-on-card authentication method.”

Manufacturing 

ABI predicts that the cost of manufacturing biometric payment cards will fall from US$20-30 to US$13-20 per unit as the market moves “away from discrete components and from distributed component architectures towards integrated solutions”.

“This is being achieved thanks to two primary market developments; 1) a system-on-package approach, integrating some of the componentry onto an ASIC, reducing the total number of components required, 2) a single silicon approach, whereby an inlay consists of a single chip and sensor,” the research adds.

BNP Paribas announced its plans to begin issuing payment cards with a built-in fingerprint sensor in June 2020.

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