As payments become more intricate, Mastercard today announced the latest enhancement to its new Mastercard Payment Passkey Service which enables secure, on-device biometric authentication through facial scans or fingerprints, the same way consumers unlock their phones every day. By combining the fraud-busting powers of tokenization, convenience of payment passkeys, and the addition of streamlined guest checkout capability courtesy of Click to Pay, consumers can now enjoy seamless, one-click checkout across devices, browsers, and operating systems, eliminating the need for static or one-time passwords (OTPs).

Crucially, by using Mastercard Click to Pay, online shoppers no longer need to have an account or a saved card-on-file with a merchant in order to use biometric authentication with payment passkeys, making quick, easy, secure guest checkout a reality. At the same time, merchants will see fewer abandoned carts, increased sales and fraud protection, while issuers will gain top-of-wallet status and customer security, demonstrating the far-reaching benefits for the entire ecosystem.

Today's launch at the Singapore FinTech Festival marks the latest milestone in Mastercard's mission to reinvent checkout. It is also a fast follow to the payment technology company's global launch of biometric authentication enabled by the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service to millions of consumers in India in August of this year, and subsequent extensions to key markets around the world. In just a few months, the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service has rapidly gained momentum with merchants, and continues to scale as leading banks, payment aggregators and online merchants adopt the service.

"Just as contactless technology made in-person payments seamless and ubiquitous, Mastercard sees the opportunity to bring that same experience to online checkout. That's why we're calling 'time' on one-time passwords and multi-step payment authentication," said Sandeep Malhotra, executive vice president, Products & Innovation, Asia Pacific, Mastercard. "With biometric authentication with payment passkeys, shoppers are spared the hassle of cumbersome checkouts while merchants enjoy both speed and security."

Key benefits of the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service:

• Hassle-free Checkout: Payment passkeys offer a frictionless user experience with no waiting for banking applications or push notifications (an especially tiresome endeavour where poor connectivity is an issue).
• More Sales: Merchants reduce cases of cart abandonment as they make customer transactions faster, easier and more reliable.
• Tighter Security: By offering biometric authentication, payment passkeys eliminate the risk of passwords being stolen or compromised, protecting shoppers from fraud and scams. Instead of stressing over payment safety, merchants can free up time to focus on customer care and product development to build deeper trust with their customers.  

Despite the popularity of passwords and OTPs, these traditional verification methods are increasingly vulnerable to online scams like phishing or being intercepted by fraudsters via screen mirroring. In fact, 80% of confirmed data breaches globally are related to weak or stolen passwords, so it's no surprise that the majority of consumers (91%) in Asia Pacific worry about cyber threats. To address this, Mastercard Payment Passkeys replace traditional passwords and OTPs with biometric authentication, making transactions faster and more secure by eliminating the risk of losing or inadvertently sharing credentials with scammers.

Importantly, by tokenizing both payment credentials and biometric authentication, the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service ensures that neither the consumer's payment credentials, nor biometric data are ever shared with third parties, rendering the data useless to fraudsters and scammers.