Indian consumers overwhelmingly favour use of biometrics as a faster, easier, and more secure alternative to passwords: The all-too-common frustration of forgetting a password may soon become a thing of the past, as people become more comfortable with new forms of biometric authentication. Fingerprint, facial and voice recognition are increasingly becoming ways to authenticate a person for access and payments. They’re faster, easier and more secure compared to the traditional use of passwords or PINs, which are difficult to remember and easy to steal. But does this mean the password could soon go the way of the dial-up modem? According to the results from a recent survey commissioned by Visa, consumers are ready to leave the password behind.

January  23 2018: Visa, the world’s leader in digital payments, today announced a survey, conducted on Indians exploring awareness and perceptions of biometric authentication confirms that consumers continue to have a strong interest in new biometric technologies that make their lives easier. New forms of authentication, such as fingerprint, facial, and voice recognition, can make unlocking accounts and payments much easier and more convenient than traditional passwords or PINs - which are difficult to type onto tiny keyboards, easy to forget, and can be stolen.
“The payments ecosystem is witnessing a rapid change in adoption of new form factors of payments and modes of authentication. For financial institutions, the time has never been better to integrate biometric technology into banking apps and payments experiences for customers,” said TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, Visa, India & South Asia, Visa. “We are excited with the increased popularity of biometrics across Indian consumers.  Today smartphones have advanced features increasing the accuracy and speed of biometrics, such that they can be used for financial transactions. Indian consumers too have discovered the ease of biometric authentication and are open to using this technology for transactions going forward, which augurs well for the Indian payments industry.”
Authentication Survey Findings
According to the Visa study conducted of 500 Indians by AYTM Market Research, 99% are personally interested in using at least one biometric method to verify their identity, and 99% are interested in using at least one biometric method to make payments.  Higher income consumers are more interested than lower income consumers in facial recognition. Younger consumers (36 and under) are more interested than older consumers in vein pattern recognition. Findings from the survey illustrate consumers’ desire to see the implementation of biometric tools in payment authentication processes.

Highlights from the survey include:

• Consumers were most familiar with fingerprint recognition, with 32 percent having used it once or twice and another 63 percent using it regularly. By comparison, about 48 percent have used voice recognition in the past and 26 percent use it regularly.
• The top benefits associated with using biometric authentication for payments are the perception that it is more secure than passwords/PINs (48%) and that it gives consumers peace of mind that their payment is protected (46%).
• Indian consumers overwhelmingly perceive that biometrics are faster (81%) and easier (84%) than passwords.
• Fifty one percent are concerned both about the risk of a security breach of sensitive biometric information.

SEE a  video on fingerprint authentication in our tech video spot for a few days
To help financial institutions and merchants more quickly adopt emerging biometric authentication solutions, the Visa ID Intelligence platform provides a curated selection of leading third-party authentication technologies. Visa clients can create, test and adopt new authentication solutions with simple integrations using Visa APIs and SDKs