Contactless payments with inherence: Strong customer authentication and biometrics

Abstract

Consumers in Finland can make payments simply by showing their card to the reader. For bigger amounts, a strong customer authentication is required. Typically, the authentication is done by inserting chip card to reader and punching in a PIN code.

Global COVID-19 pandemic has also had an impact on payments and the use of contactless payments has seen a boost.

This thesis presents the technology behind contactless payments and the evolution of payments in Finland and describes how strong customer authentication can be achieved with factors of possession, knowledge and inherence.

A survey with 189 responses was conducted to understand consumer’s order of preference to use fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, facial recognition and finger vein recognition and whether the use of a personal or an external device would influence the preference order. With personal devices, fingerprint recognition was most preferred method but with external devices, facial recognition was as popular as fingerprint recognition.

On the mandatory open comments, survey respondents stated that they are concerned about security and privacy if they’d use external device. This is something that payment industry will need to focus on going forward.

Two semi-structured interviews with industry specials were conducted to support both theoretical framework and the survey.