Qualcomm is providing the biometric authentication system for transactions on Tencent’s WeChat mPayment platform.
Called Qualcomm Haven, the authentication system accords with Tencent’s SOTER protocol, ensuring that it relies on fingerprint scanning and matching, stores the biometric data locally, and transmits it to Tencent’s servers. To start, it will be available on the Vivo X6 smartphone, but Qualcomm says more devices will launch with Qualcomm Haven in the months to come.
Commenting on the authentication system, Qualcomm Technologies senior director of product management Sy Choudhury described it as a “framework” that “supports convient, robust security and the latest mobile payment standards.” He also pointed to additional biometric modalities offered by Qualcomm Haven, asserting that it allows users to “simply rely on their finger, face, or eye for account access and conducting online transactions using their mobile devices—all while being reassured that each step of the process is being executed with hardware-level security.”
The partnership with China-based Tencent should provide an opportunity to bring this kind of biometric authentication to a wide swath of consumers; WeChat is a social media app with hundreds of millions of monthly users, and its mPayment feature could soon introduce many of them to fingerprint-authenticated transactions.
Follow Us