Mobile Biometrics to Authenticate $2 Trillion in Sales By 2023: Juniper Research

Mobile biometrics will authenticate $2 trillion worth of in-store and remote mobile payment transactions annually by 2023, according to a new study from Juniper Research. This is 17 times the $124 billion expected in 2018, as initiatives furthering secure remote payment transactions and more open biometric platforms proliferate.

The research forecasts that the fastest growth will come from biometrically verified remote mobile commerce (mCommerce) transactions, reaching over 48 billion in volume by 2023. This will account for 57 percent of all biometric transactions, up from an estimated 28 percent in 2018.

The new research, “Mobile Payment Security: Biometric Authentication & Tokenization 2018-2023”, expects this growth to be driven both by industry standardization initiatives, like Visa’s Secure Remote Commerce, and smartphone vendors introducing different forms of biometric authentication.

Juniper anticipates that over 80 percent of smartphones will have some form of biometric hardware by 2023, representing just over 5 billion smartphones. This traditionally has meant fingerprint sensors, but facial recognition and iris scanning will become more prominent over the next five years, with adoption exceeding 1 billion devices.

Despite this hardware proliferation, Juniper believes the main innovations in mobile biometrics lie with Biometrics-as-a-Service (BaaS) software, which employs artificial intelligence (AI) to check users’ identities on any platform.

Juniper’s report estimates that nearly 90 percent of smartphones currently in use can support software-based facial recognition, while 80 percent are capable of voice-based payments.

Juniper believes that these services, as well as tracking user behavior, will enable secure cloud-based identity checks that are cross-platform and authenticate in the background. The research forecasts over 1.5 billion smartphones to use software-based biometrics by 2023.

“The possibilities for software-based continuous behavioral biometric authentication are huge,” notes research author James Moar. “The flexible programming allows businesses to deploy any level of authentication they require relatively easily, while ensuring that transactions are properly authenticated.”

(For more information visit https://www.juniperresearch.com).