BMCI Customers Can Now Use Fingerprints to Pay

Rabat – Customers at BMCI will now be able to pay for groceries and other goods using just their fingerprints.

The bank – subsidiary of French bank BNP Paribas – announced on April 22 the launch of its first biometric Visa “card”.

BMCI customers can now apply for a biometric payment Visa Infinite card that uses their fingerprint to authenticate contactless payments, rather than a physical card with a chip.

The Visa Infinite biometric card comes with a small black ‘registration reader’ box that allows customers to record and link two of their fingerprints to the card.

Customers can then use one of their registered fingerprints to authenticate payments by placing it on the card’s fingerprint sensor.

The BMCI website said that “the Visa Infinite Biometric card is a withdrawal and payment card for national and international use from the prestigious Visa Infinite line.”

The bank added that to activate it, “you just need to put your finger on the card at the time of the transaction.”

According to Nerd Wallet, the Visa Infinite credit card has a package of “super premium benefits,” that are available on certain Visa labeled cards. The Visa Infinite card is usually promoted to high-net-worth customers.

According to the official Visa website, these premium benefits include getting access to VIP lounges at over 1,200 airports around the world, and a 24/7 personalized assistance for “travel planning, dinner reservations, sports and entertainment tickets.”

BMCI’s parent company BNP Paribas began providing biometric payment cards to its Visa Infinite cards in France in January 2021.

The first ever fingerprint credit card to appear in Morocco was released by the BMCE bank group in March 2019.

Morocco’s Credit Agricole bank group partnered up with Mastercard to introduce its first credit cards with fingerprint sensors, alongside other new technology, in March 2022.

Biometric scanners

According to Kaspersky antivirus website, Biometric scanners are pieces of hardware used to capture biometric data for identity verification. These biometric data can include fingerprint imprints, facial patterns, or even voice samples.

Scanners compare the registered data to that saved on a database to approve or deny a person system access.

Biometric security basically means that your body becomes the “key” to unlocking your systems.

Biometric scanners can be found in security doors. They can also be required to access your bank account, smartphones, or public transportation. Home assistants Artificial Intelligence bots like Alexa by Amazon also take advantage of audio biometric data to be activated.

However, there have been ethical concerns raised with the advancement of these new identification technologies.

The ability of the government to use biometrics for surveillance poses the greatest threat to privacy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, unauthorized identification and tracking may become the norm as face recognition technologies improve and cameras become more capable of recording in greater and greater detail.

Biometric databases can also be targeted by hackers, putting people at risk of identity-based attacks.