PayPal Seeks to Move ‘Beyond the Password’ with App Update

PayPal says it is further expanding the availability of biometric authentication for its mobile users via Android Marshmallow, allowing users of devices like the Nexus 5X and Samsung Galaxy S7 to log in with the touch of a finger.

In a blog post announcing the move, PayPal’s mobile app head Mike Ryan explained that it’s “part of PayPal’s ongoing effort to help the tech industry move people beyond the password,” pointing to previous innovations such as PayPal’s One Touch checkout system. Ryan also notes that iPhone users can already log in to the app via fingerprint scan, and that 60 percent of all iOS logins are now done this way.

Building on a major app overhaul earlier this year, the move makes the PayPal app even more similar to mPayment platforms like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, which leverage fingerprint scanning—and soon iris scanning, in Samsung Pay’s case—to verify transactions. But it also helps to make PayPal more in step with the IT industry more broadly as it moves beyond deprecated password security, and often toward biometric authentication as a replacement. Given that 60 percent of iOS users are already using fingerprint scanning to log in to the app, there would seem to be considerable demand for such solutions.