Not long after India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) launched a feature enabling users to approve payments with a fingerprint or facial scan, Amazon Pay rolled out its own support for biometric authentication.
Previously, consumers were required to enter a PIN to authorize transactions. Under the new feature, UPI now allows transactions of up to ₹5,000 (approximately $56) to be approved using biometric verification. The functionality is available across a wide range of payment use cases, including peer-to-peer (P2P) payments and merchant transactions.
Amazon Pay highlighted the friction-reducing benefits of biometrics and noted strong early adoption, with over 90% of eligible users opting to use biometric authentication for P2P payments.
The company also emphasized that biometric authentication offers enhanced fraud protection, as credentials are tied to a specific device and cannot be shared. Additionally, facial or fingerprint scans can be performed with one hand, which could help speed up checkout lines for smaller transactions.
The Rising Role
As more users have become accustomed to using biometric authentication to perform actions on their phones, expectations have grown that biometrics will play a larger role in payments.
However, broader adoption has faced several challenges—most notably, the lack of widely deployed infrastructure to accept biometric payments in many regions. Additionally, consumers must be made aware of these programs and choose to opt in. In markets like the U.S., the dominance of card payments means many users have not recognized a compelling value proposition for adopting biometrics.
All these factors explain why there have been few large-scale implementations of biometrics in payments worldwide, despite a rising number of pilot programs and proof-of-concept projects.
A Global Force
This is why the UPI launch represents a watershed for biometric authentication in payments. UPI processes roughly 20 billion transactions per month, and its owner, the National Payments Corporation of India, handles nearly half of the world’s digital transactions.
The real-time payments system has become a global payments force in just seven years and continues to expand its reach. This rapid growth is one of the reasons Amazon has invested heavily in its Amazon Pay platform in India.
While the wallet currently holds only a fraction of the market share compared with leaders PhonePE and Google Pay, Amazon Pay’s biometric launch is a milestone for real-world biometrics applications that could provide a blueprint for further adoption.
