When payments pundits start talking mobile payments, there’s always two hot topics that are top of mind: biometrics and authentication. Authentication, of course, has always been the “hot-off-the-press” type of buzzword that industry experts have debated. This includes the best methods — and technologies — to achieve the top security measures to ensure that identities are properly verified when it comes to mobile payments.
 
That’s where the concept of TouchID, passwords and PINs came into the mix, but it didn’t take long for tech and payments companies to realize there’s probably more sophisticated ways to authenticate a payment. Fingerprints? “So 2014,” some say. Iris scanning? Getting closer. But it seems, at least from the interest from Alibaba with Alipay, and more recently from MasterCard, more companies are throwing their hat into the biometrics ring to discuss how facial scanning authentication might be the next big thing in mobile payments.
 
Alibaba made it clear last year that it wants to have the selfie be the new way to pay. Perhaps the next wave of big “Pay” players might have “Smile Pay” in their names. Online payments are always a big headache. You forget your password … you worry about security,” said Alibaba founder Jack Ma at an event in March, speaking to a group of tech enthusiasts. He even pulled out his phone to take a selfie to show how easy it was to pay via facial scanning.
 
Meanwhile, Face++, the startup behind the facial recognition technology that would power that service, recently raised $25 million, which shows there’s a least some investors who believe in the concept, too. And that’s not all that shocking since figures from the Biometrics Research Group project the biometrics market is expected to grow to $15 billion in 2015 alone.