Middle Eastern Banks Commence Trials of Biometric Visa Cards

Ten Middle Eastern banks are now trialing biometric payment cards featuring Zwipe technology, the company has announced.

The trials commenced this week, and are the product of a collaboration with Lebanon-based FinTech solutions provider Areeba, as well as Unilux Cards and Gemalto. The cards in play are Visa payment cards, featuring a built-in fingerprint sensor enabling cardholder authentication for each transaction.

Gemalto first announced that Areeba had signed on as a distributor for the biometric Visa cards in April of this year, with the latter agreeing to promote the technology to its client network. Fingerprint Cards is also playing a role in the collaboration. The fingerprint sensor specialist recently announced that its technology was being used in a Visa-led biometric payment card trial featuring Zwipe technology at about the same time, and confirmed today that it is indeed providing FPC1300-series sensors for the deployments in question.

In a statement announcing the newly launched biometric Visa card trials, Zwipe CEO André Løvestam explained that “several Zwipe employees have used the card for the last two months… with the cards functioning seamlessly in both contactless and contact mode in many different payment environments across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the United States.” Løvestam added that his firm is “optimistic that the pilots coming online now across the Middle East, and others that we have lined up in other regions, will enable our first mover advantage to translate into commercial success.”