While Chinese Ecommerce giant Alibaba prepares for what some believe to be the largest IPO in history, the company is not slowing down on innovations.
The newest innovation from Jack Ma’s Alibaba links to its highly successful Ewallet AliPay. Following the path made available by firms like PayPal, AliPay will now incorporate biometric fingerprint scanner support to verify a specific customer rather than entering a password.
“The biometric technology…will allow mobile users to confirm Payments for a wide variety of goods and services with their smartphones simply by swiping a digit instead of entering a lengthy code.”
Similarly to how PayPal partnered with Samsung for biometric support for the S5, AliPay partnered with local Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei. Huawei’s new Mate 7 smartphone, like many being released, incorporates a fingerprint ID scanner for security purposes. The phone is slated to launch this week.
Alibaba added on the strength of its biometric security features by comparing to rivals:
“Biometric technology such as fingerprint or retina recognition is touted as a more secure and convenient of method of identity authentication. Banks, governments, credit-card companies and mobile phone manufacturers have been exploring possibilities in the industry, but the development path has some potholes. Fingerprint readers on Samsung’s Galaxy 5 and Apple’s iPhone 5 have been successfully hacked, defeating the security function that prevents unauthorized use”
Alongside fingerprint ID, another concept of retina scanning is being explored. As with fingerprints, an eyeball tracker can insure customer identity. While no devices have been released just yet that offer such a feature, it is not sure how much more secure it can be in comparison.
What are your thoughts? Is biometric verification the way to go? Finger ID or retina scanning? Let us know in the comment section below.
Picture of Jack Ma courtesy of Wikipedia
