As a consumer, it's relatively easy to miss what otherwise would be considered a significant evolution in point-of-sale payment flows.
Ask me to point to the year in which consumers broadly stopped swiping and started inserting the chip in the payment terminal, and I'd be lucky to guess within five years of that shift. The same could be said for tap-to-pay if the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't still deeply burned into my memory.
There's another shift on the horizon that is set to make point of sale payments even faster that consumers are likely to take note of: biometric authorization. The budding technology allows payments to be initiated through
Payments companies have recently been working to bring this new technology to retail payments. New payment terminals from
I tried them at the show. Here's what I found.
Ingenico's palm vein-scanning terminal
Ingenico's terminal uses palm vein-scanning technology to verify the consumer's identity and initiate a payment, thereby eliminating the need to pull out your phone or wallet.
Infrared scanners read palm veins, verify blood flow and match the vein map to a digital identity to which the payment method — a debit or credit card — is attached. Palm veins, I'm told, are similar to fingerprints, insofar as they are unique to each individual, but harder to replicate. (Think about those movies where the spy is able to lift someone's fingerprints using a piece of tape. You can't do that with palm veins.) Once verified, the payment is tokenized as it would be if the user tapped their card.
The onboarding process is fairly straightforward. I provided my name and my phone number before pairing my payment method. Next, I placed my hand, palm down, just above a clear scanner to the right — it's contactless — which scanned my palm three times. The whole process took less than a minute.
Surprisingly, paying with your palm doesn't feel much different than paying with your phone. The process of raising my hand to the terminal is akin to waving my phone in front of a near-field communication terminal and provides the same feeling of intent as other, more traditional point-of-sale payment methods.
But the reduction of the number of steps needed to complete the payment — namely, pulling out your phone and typing in your passcode, or grabbing your wallet and removing the payment card — is noticeable, and will likely be hard to come back from once the technology achieves mainstream success.
JPMorgan Payments unveils two new biometric terminals
Both devices run on Android technology, which allows retailers to integrate their own apps into the device, and can process payments via chip, contactless, swipe, QR code or facial recognition or palm-scanning verification.
While the palm-scanning technology wasn't available to demo at the show (that will be piloted this year, with a wider rollout planned for 2026),
Once that was complete, I simply looked at the payment terminal and fit my face into a small, rectangular box on the screen. The terminal was even able to detect and recognize my face when there was another face present over my shoulder. This process also took less than a minute.
As smooth as it is, the technology from both terminal manufacturers feels a bit uncanny, and I can see how the lack of friction in the payment process would give some consumers pause to readily adopt it. Not to mention, having your biometric data stored with a third party — no matter how secure — can feel a little Big Brother.
I imagine that once consumers get over that hump, and as more merchants adopt it, biometric payments will be here to stay.
I can't help thinking of my iPhone. Two years ago, there was nothing you could say to persuade me to turn on Face ID. But one afternoon spent toggling between six different banking and finance apps convinced me to skip the password and let my phone do the work for me.
Now, it feels like typing my four-digit PIN is a chore.
