Sunday, November 22, 2020

Waddya know

Biometric smart cards and civic digital identity apps to redefine wallets
The advance of biometric smart cards for digital identity and payments, and their eventual replacement by apps in the former case, is the top theme of the week’s biometrics news. Even in an industry somewhat numbed to enormous growth forecasts, there are some sizeable numbers being projected in digital ID app use and potential addressable card fraud. Facial recognition improvement efforts and controversy also made headlines.

A pair of new smart card solutions, one with multi-modal biometrics for access control and payments from CrucialTrak, and a ‘Converged Card’ from Idemia and Mastercard that combines a government ID, like a mobile driver’s license, with payment functionality, made up the top news story of the week on Biometric Update.

Add this to Google's new wallet app and we get smart contracts and possibly petty cash.   I was a year early in predicting this arrival. The technology requires autonomous bots to enforce. We will see how government puts limits on these bots. All I want for Christmas here is petty cash for online content sales.

The article claims some 6 billion of us will have SmartCards functionality, most of that within our mobile smart phones. The first smartphone vendor with the complete solution wins big.

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