Consumers “will be wary” of the new biometric...
Consumers “will be wary” of the new biometric mobile payment feature in Samsung’s coming Galaxy S5 smartphone, predicted Eden Zoller, Ovum principal analyst-consumer. The feature will enable users of the S5 to use fingerprint authentication for mobile payments with PayPal…
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merchants. But Ovum thinks consumers will “need some convincing due to security concerns,” said Zoller. Forty-nine percent of respondents in Ovum’s 2013 Consumer Insights Survey ranked lack of security as their main concern with mobile payments, she said. “Consumers already worried about the security of established m-payment mechanisms are likely to view a new technology and process with suspicion,” she predicted. But Samsung is a “hugely popular smartphone brand with global reach, while PayPal is a trusted payments service provider,” so the partnership on the S5 represents a “powerful combination,” she said. PayPal also stressed that fingerprint authentication is a secure feature based on a Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance-ready software implementation with all credentials stored remotely in the cloud, she said. PayPal was the first member of the FIDO Alliance to produce such a mobile payment solution. Other FIDO members include BlackBerry, Google, Lenovo and Microsoft. The PayPal fingerprint authentication feature will go live when the S5 ships in 26 markets in April, including the U.S. and U.K., PayPal said in a news release. The only information the device will share with PayPal is a “unique encrypted key that allows PayPal to verify the identity of the customer without having to store any biometric information” on PayPal’s servers, it said. Other S5 features include Download Booster, a Wi-Fi technology for boosting data speed by bonding Wi-Fi and LTE simultaneously, Samsung said in a news release. The version of the S5 offered by Sprint in the U.S. will support Pinsight Touch, a nationwide, open platform for near field communication-enabling mobile applications and services, the carrier said.