A MasterCard selfie to confirm the card owner's identity now provides a security check for payments made through a new facial recognition app.
The credit card company has been testing the feature in the United States and the Netherlands with positive reviews and now plans to introduce it in several countries, according to
The Verge.
"We will have a lot of information about your transaction," said Ajay Bhalla, MasterCard's president of enterprise security solutions. "Where are you, where are the goods getting shipped, what is your location."
MasterCard users who want to try to selfie app will have to download it to their smartphone or tablet, said
CNN. After making an online purchase, the app allows the credit card user to take the selfie for confirmation.
Customers can also opt for fingerprint authentication, which is available on iPhone6 and iPhone 6S. MasterCard said it is also looking at iris scans, voice recognition and even monitoring heartbeats as means of customer identification, noted CNN.
"Consumers are really loving it," Bhalla told the
Financial Times. "Nobody likes being falsely accused of something, but that's what it feels like when a transaction is falsely declined. As criminals have become smarter, so efforts to prevent fraud have resulted in an increase in genuine transactions being declined."
Fortune magazine said false declines on legitimate transactions because of suspected fraud has become an increasing problem for MasterCard, costing the company some $118 billion per year —13 times more than actual fraud.
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