Making UPI Payments With Facial Recognition And Fingerprint Scanning — Explained
These features are expected to help reduce transaction failure and improve security as facial scans and fingerprints are much harder to steal than a six-digit PIN.
The National Payments Corp. on Tuesday, introduced the feature to use biometric authentication to operate the unified payments interface without having to manually enter a PIN code.
This facilitates users to user facial recognition and fingerprint scanning technology to make payments via UPI. These features are expected to help reduce transaction failure and improve security as facial scans and fingerprints are much harder to steal than a six-digit PIN. Here's how users can activate and use these new features.
To have their biometrics saved in the UPI app, users need to provide express consent and save their biometrics by opening their app and navigating to Settings> Security > Biometric Authentication.
To make a payment, users must scan the quick response code of the receiver or select their contact information. After doing so, they can selected the concerned bank and enter the amount. When requested to share their UPI PIN, users should select the 'Use Biometric' option on their screen.
They then need to authenticate their concerned biometrics via either fingerprint or facial recognition done by aligning their face as required with their phone camera or having their fingerprint scanned.
The transaction will be executed after authentication and users just need to wait for the confirmation message.
This payment method may also trade convenience for usability as it could also make accidental transactions more frequent due to the instant nature of the biometric authentication feature. Biometric payment information is also permanent and cannot be reset like a PIN can.
Users need to provide consent once again if they're logging into a new device. If a UPI PIN is reset or changed, banks need to deactivate biometric authentication for the concerned account, until the user themselves reactivates it.
UPI applications are to update their encryption keys at the minimum of once a year to maintain security . The feature becomes inactive if a user does not make biometric transactions for 90 days, and will be enabled again after receiving user confirmation.
