Mobile Biometrics to Authorize Over $2 Trillion in Mobile Payments by 2023: Report

Mobile biometric technology is going to play a much bigger role in payments over the next few years, according to a new market forecast from Juniper Research. The UK-based firm predicts that by 2023, such technology will be used to verify two trillion dollars’ worth of in-store and remote purchases – a value that is 17 times greater than the $124 billion in payments anticipated for this year.

According to the report, entitled “Mobile Payment Security: Biometric Authentication & Tokenisation 2018-2023”, this growth will be driven primarily by smartphone vendors and standardization efforts in the payments industry. With respect to the former, Juniper Research anticipates that over 80 percent of smartphones will feature biometric sensors by 2023,

That estimate that may strike some industry watchers as rather low given the current prevalence of fingerprint sensors across a wide range of smartphones, but Juniper Research has its eye on two other main trends. One is the rise of mobile facial and iris recognition, which is already being spearheaded by industry leaders Apple and Samsung. Juniper Research says that adoption of such technologies will surpass a billion devices by the end of its forecast period.

The other big trend – indeed, the biggest one, in Juniper Research’s view – is the rise of software-based biometrics, which almost 90 percent of today’s smartphones are already able to support. Software-driven facial, voice, and behavioral recognition will allow for cloud-based authentication that can run passively, and Juniper Research expects more than 1.5 billion smartphones to take advantage of this technology by 2023.