Lorenzo Gaston, Technical Director of the Smart Payment Association (SPA) to speak at CARTES 2013

Munich, 18th November 2013 – Tackling fraud and extending banking services to previously underserved populations are just some of benefits Lorenzo Gaston, Technical Director of the Smart Payment Association (SPA) will highlight when he takes the stage on Thursday 21st November 2013 at www.cartes.com  to explain why the Time is Now for Biometrics in Financial Services.

The introduction of biometric cardholder verification represents an important step forward for the finance industry, opening the way to eliminating fraud for issuers and cardholders, reducing costs, and providing the additional security and identity verification required to support remote or cross-border transactions.

Gaston will review how today’s proven biometric technologies deliver the security, privacy and performance the financial services industry needs, setting out the SPA position on how biometric Match-on-Card authentication delivers definitive advantages in terms of security and data privacy.

Andreas Strobel, President, SPA said: “The introduction of biometrics authentication would deliver significant benefits in terms of tackling card payment fraud, extending cardholder verification through the introduction of an additional validation factor.

Adding biometric functionality to an EMV card has the potential to facilitate access to financial services for previously hard to reach populations and opens the way to provisioning a range of services that require a legally accepted digital signature – from subscribing to a new financial service through to proceeding with a mobile commerce transaction or the download and transfer of electronic money.”

Lorenzo Gaston will present the SPA position on biometric cardholder authentication on 21 November at 12.30, during the Biometrics: Privacy and Security Concerns conference track of CARTES 2013.

In support of CARTES activity, the SPA is announcing the availability of a whitepaper on Biometrics for Payment Applications which sets out the SPA vision on financial match-on-card payment and provides a framework of the guiding principles, specifications and best practices required to underpin the expansion of biometrics into financial applications.

Download paper at www.smartpaymentassociation.com.