The future of payments used to
be all about the next big gadget: a watch, a ring, a phone. But now, at a major fintech conference here in
Amsterdam, gadgets are a lot harder to come by. That’s because one of the biggest trends
in the payments industry is called biometrics. All you need to make a payment? Your face, your voice, your fingerprint,
maybe even your heartbeat. Hello Knomi, please verify my identity. There we are, successful. Now you’d be able to go ahead and continue with
the payment, whatever you're doing with your day. Go ahead and buy something.
It’s that simple. You’re literally just using your face and
your voice to make that payment. Face and voice. You always have
them with you, you can’t forget them. Instead of entering a pin or a password, you would
use your face or the voice as another option. Verify my identity. Biometrics like your voice
are increasingly being used

to authenticate payments from
devices like mobile phones. And thanks to home assistants like
Amazon Echo or Google Home, voice payments are becoming a fast
and easy way to make purchases without ever leaving the house -
or even the sofa. It’s basically teaching computers to understand
your voice and match that voice to your identity. So that now through a simple voice
command, you’d be able to say, Alexa, please buy so and so for me. And then Alexa would be able to
say, Yep, that’s Steve Ritter’s voice, I’m going to go ahead and
make that purchase for him. Research shows voice assistants are
most commonly used to seek information, like the news or the weather,
and to play music and videos. But retail is becoming a bigger function
with 35% of consumers using voice to buy products like groceries,
home care, or clothes. The voice shopping market is expected to grow
to $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion today.

And right now, it’s dominated by a few big
players: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. If you become, as a provider, the top payment
method of one of those large platforms, the probability that you really out-beat everything
and everybody in the market is quite high. Sorry, I don't know that one. But there are still obstacles to making
purchases with just our voices. Just as easy as it is for me to make a payment
using my voice and my Amazon account, somebody else could use that to make purchases either
for theft, or maybe more importantly, money laundering. Some experts say biometrics aren’t the problem,
they’re the solution, to making payments safer. The most common
password is 123456. Biometrics actually changes the consumer
experience and actually makes it more secure too. With a recent survey showing 93% of consumers
prefer biometrics over traditional passwords, it might not be too long before
voice payments go mainstream.

Hey everyone, Elizabeth here.
Thanks for tuning in. What do you think about the future of payments?
Would you use your voice to buy something? Let us know in the comments section, and be
sure to check out more of our videos over here. Talk to you later!

An inside look at the future of payments | CNBC Reports

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