Samsung’s IT service affiliate has announced plans to launch its own fingerprint mobile payment service, according to a ZDNet article by Cho Mu-hyun. Samsung SDS says the service will start in South Korea in partnership with KG Inicis and KG Mobilians, and later expand globally.
It’s part of a larger strategy to get involved in biometric authentication technologies. Samsung SDS has already made a deal with the government-affiliated certificate licenser Korea Information Certificate Authority, and says that its biometric authentication solution – a multimodal system using iris, face, and voice scanning – is FIDO Ready. In a statement, a Samsung SDS spokesperson explained that the company aims to offer biometric authentication solutions to other businesses, and that the company expects “previous authentication technology such as passwords, certificates, and OTP will be replaced by FIDO-approved methods,” adding, “FIDO-backed biometric authentications will become the de facto standard of the future.”
Presumably, the new fingerprint mobile payment system will be integrated into Samsung Pay, the company’s major new mPayment platform, which will be going up against some stiff competition in the growing mPayment market – most notably Apple Pay, which itself has pioneered the use of mobile biometric authentication in this area. But Samsung SDS’ long-term plan to move into biometric authentication more generally could have major payoffs as the Internet of Things explodes into the mainstream, given the importance of such technology in securing the many everyday devices that will be connecting online.
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