Click a selfie and make a payment!

Now, you can click a selfie and make payments thanks to MasterCard’s newest rumble into integrating technology with banking. The organization is all set to use facial recognition and fingerprint technology to authenticate its banking transactions.

MasterCard’s new ‘Selfie Pay’ feature allows its users to verify their identity and complete purchases. It is planning to roll out the feature in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and a few other European countries. The company has rolled out this feature in an attempt to curb identity thefts and credit card fraud.

In the pilot test, 750 participants were able to complete the transaction without passwords, pins, or any other form of authentication.

So how does the selfie pay work?

There will be a separate app that will help users to complete the transaction. The app can scan biometric points on your face and fingerprint every time you make a transaction. What about if you use an old picture? The company says that the app takes into account physical depth and it is mandatory that you blink, in order to prove your authenticity.

While this does seem like a better step towards protecting credit card fraud, the point still remains about its usability in the regular world. In a test condition, the environment is ideal and so the concept works. But there are other things to consider like the surrounding environment in real life, the speed of the app, physical changes to the human, and so on. The difference here is that instead of people fishing their pockets for their credit cards, they would be clicking selfies to make sure that their transaction goes through.

MasterCard is exploring more options like monitoring heartbeats and retina scans in order to beef up security. But I must admit, the idea of using a selfie to pay really does sound innovative and exciting.