They move hand in hand with mobile phones. And they resort to different biometric methods to offer secure authentication.

The replacement of cash for other alternatives started with credit cards. But for a few years electronic wallets have been an option on the rise. In essence, they are applications that allow users to use their smartphone (or their tablet, computer or smart watch) to make purchases and payments, avoiding the need to carry credit cards. In a column for the online edition of Forbes Mexico, Marcelo Fondacaro, Commercial Director of VeriTran, comments that “this technology is currently used in Spain, South Korea, England and the United States. In Latin America, countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia implemented it since 2012. In addition to replacing the use of plastics and cash, it allows access to more functions such asperson-to-person payments and immediate transfers to any Mobile. Its use significantly reduces the risk of fraud, since it has a system that allows you to select the card or account with which the Payment will be made, and authentication can be done through biometrics of the face (selfie) or a fingerprint and / or with a soft token that generates one-time keys “.

An electronic wallet can store – in the same mobile device, or in the Cloud – digital money and cards to make payments (the person downloads an app and there records the data of their cards, which in this way are linked to your smartphone). The user may pay for purchases via the Web or through the mobile application. You can also pay through contactless systems in shops that have Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, QR code readers, etc.

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To access the full-color touchscreen device, you enter a password and your biometric identification (fingerprint). There is a slim card included in the wallet so that you can access any bank or credit accounts – rather than carrying multiple debit and credit cards with you throughout the day. We never store any of your personal data on the cloud, and we protect the Biometric Wallet through a multilayered cloud security ESN. This is state-of-the-art tech right in your pocket, just the tool that you need to keep yourself safe in the digital era. So World’s Smallest All In One Biometric ID Wallet is one of the best tool for secure transaction and personal data.

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In the event that NFC is used – the wireless proximity technology that is being imposed worldwide – the system “connects to two devices and allows reading and writing in both directions. When paying, the mobile phone is brought to a reader, an application is opened, known as a digital wallet and then the operation is validated with the fingerprint or with a password. The smartphone sends the code for the transaction and the transfer is made, “explains Daniel Cohen, a reference of Digital Payments & Labs of MasterCard in a column for Diario TI.

The role of biometrics

The biometric systems provide security to the operations carried out through electronic wallets. In an Infobae article, Marcelo González, CEO of VeriTran, indicates that “the combination of dynamic keys for one-time use (soft token) with the use of biometricsin the mobile device will increase the security of the channel as well as increase the rate and use of recurrence since only something that is part of the user is required such as his face, his voice or his fingerprint; something that the user has, his mobile and something that the user remembers, his password or a PIN “. In the same Infobae article, Sy Choudhury, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm, points out that “we are seeing a trend that, in addition to fingerprints, authenticators based on the camera are used to identify the user. The iris reader is the most popular, but it is also spoken of the reader of the retina and of the face (3D image of the head) “.

Challenges

The conditions would be given so that the electronic wallets have a greater deployment. The challenge is for users to incorporate the use of digital money into their daily lives. In a note to AN Digital, Gustavo Guaragna, CEO of Snoop Consulting, indicates that “using the cell phone as an electronic wallet is a phenomenon that appeared a long time ago. The big change was introduced by Apple, but then extended to the rest, with the iPhone 4 that already had an authentication function by fingerprint. This was implemented to optimize their platform businesses and begin to transform the mobile into an authentication platform for all types of transactions, including payment transactions. There are very ingenious authentication systems that do biometrics, which mainly detect the user by their physical characteristics; we talk about the trace but it could be the tone of voice, facial recognition, the way in which the type is typed or the shape of the hand “. According to Guaragna, creating a mobile payments platform does not require cell phones with specific hardware: “However, the main problem is cultural prejudices: there is still a long way to go before this form of payment is naturalized in the local market.”