If there’s one exciting trend in payments right now, it’s the rise of biometrics, and so it was no surprise to see “Digital Identity & Biometrics” emerge as one of the four central themes of the opening day of this year’s Money20/20 event in Las Vegas. And an expert panel comprising representatives of some of the leading firms in biometric authentication made the reasons for this excitement very clear.

Moderated by FindBiometrics President Peter O’Neill, the panel included Sensory CEO Todd Mozer, FacePhi CEO Javier Mira, NEC Biometric Solutions Customer Experience Director Allen Ganz, and BioCatch Senior Threat Analyst Erin Englund. Together, the panelists helped to illustrate some of the most significant trends unfolding in biometric FinTech.

One example is customer enrollment. “There really doesn’t have to be an enrollment process,” said Englund, explaining that biometric technology can be used to passively identify individuals during online sessions. Mozer offered the example of his company’s use of facial, voice, and periocular recognition to identify an individual as they naturally use their phone, with no particular action required on the user’s part.

And mobile authentication is, of course, another key theme, with Javier Mira asserting that FacePhi’s selfie-based authentication technology has seen “a huge adoption rate”; “we have banks where the adoption rate is 93 percent”, he asserted.

This is all pointing toward a very exciting future, with even more innovative financial services in the pipeline. Offering one example, Ganz pointed out that the “curb to gate” facial recognition technology NEC recently helped to deliver to Terminal F in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport could also be adopted to facilitate payments systems that link consumers’ faces to their accounts.

It’s all very exciting, and it’s no wonder that these topics took so much of the spotlight on the opening day of the 2018 edition of Money20/20 Las Vegas.

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)