Trialled with pilot schemes in the US and Netherlands, MasterCard said the system will become available in 14 other countries in the near future, ft.com reports. MasterCard is investing in developing other new ways of ensuring identity using smartphones and other wearable devices. The group is also trialling a system that measures the user’s heartbeat through a connected bracelet to authenticate credit card transactions.
Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise security solutions at MasterCard, said that the group was also testing voice and iris scanning as it sought to eliminate fraud. “Consumers are really loving it,” he said about the trials of “selfie pay” in the Netherlands and US, the source cites.
MasterCard is also aiming to stamp out false declines, when credit card users travel abroad and have legitimate attempts to spend blocked. The value of false declines per year has hit USD 118 billion, MasterCard said, which is more than 13 times the total amount lost annually to actual card fraud. Higher-spending cardholders account for half of all false declines owing to their spending patterns.
MasterCard has developed ways to cut the rising number of card transactions being falsely declined. One out of every six cardholders has had at least one decline because of suspected fraud, it says. As a result, it has created a system that brings in information about historical behaviour using the card to predict and assess risk against a transaction, and enables the exchange of information from the merchant such as account, device ID and IP address.
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