JPMorgan Chase to roll out biometric payments with US retailers in early 2025

JPMorgan Chase recently revealed plans for a broad roll-out of biometric payments with US retailers. According to the bank, the plan is to push the feature out by early 2025, and allow shoppers to make purchases simply by scanning their palms or faces.

JPMorgan to conduct further pilots in 2024

Biometric payments are seeing a sharp rise in popularity, and Goode Intelligence assessed that they will reach $5.8 trillion by 2026. At the same time, the assessment says that global biometric payments should hit three billion users.

JPMorgan actually gave hints that it is interested in bringing this technology to its massive merchant client base last year, in 2023. At the time, it teamed up with PopID, a biometrics specialist, stating that it intends to conduct a series of pilots.

Now, a year later, JPMorgan’s executive director of biometrics and identity solutions, Prashant Sharma, stated that additional pilots are set for 2024. Once those are done, the bank believes that it will be ready for a wider roll-out.

Sharma stated that JPMorgan plans to promote this technology to every merchant and that the bank hopes that they will all adopt it. However, it said that this will be a choice for each merchant, and while they will have the option to adopt and use this technology, they will not be under obligation to do so.

Sharma said that there is perceived sensitivity toward biometrics, but adds: “We just don’t see this as a big risk”.

Creating an all-in-one payments device

Moving on, Sharma commented on what merchants will need in order to start accepting Biometric-based payments. According to him, “It will take a little bit of time, but hopefully we get to a point where there is an all-in-one device that can do card, tap, dip plus biometric data acceptance as well.”

Payment technologies are advancing rapidly, and only recently, Mastercard introduced a service that will make it easy for businesses to integrate biometrics for users logging into websites or apps, or even for making online purchases. Visa also announced that it is working on creating its own facial verification payment in partnership with PopID.

Commenting on this, Sharma acknowledged that there will be strong competition among providers. However, he pointed out that there will also be plenty of areas where all of these separate entities will be able to collaborate.

On JPMorgan’s end, the company noted that it intends to enact best practices regarding privacy, consent, transparency, as well as data minimization.