Biometric Credit Cards Are Already Here — But Do You Actually Want One?

As the story goes, Frank McNamara used the first “modern” credit card in 1950 after forgetting his wallet one too many times. Instead, he decided to pay for his meals with a small cardboard card — the Diners Club Card — and then pay off the balance at the end of the month.

McNamara probably didn’t give much thought to security back then, considering he held one of three credit cards in existence. Credit card fraud likely wasn’t even a budding idea in thieves’ minds.

Fast-forward 70 years and now more than 190 million adults in the US have a credit card in their name, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2023 credit card report.

What once started as a simple piece of cardboard has evolved into a plastic or metal card — or just a virtual version of a card. As credit card fraud and theft increased, safety features evolved from simple signatures on a receipt to embedding cards with microchips and countless unseen artificial intelligence and machine-learning protections.

Verifying your fingerprint before you make a transaction is another security option that could eliminate physical card fraud altogether.

Biometric technology is already here — you might use it every day to unlock your phone or to log in to your banking app, so how long will it take for this technology to hit our credit cards?

You may already be using it if you shop with a digital wallet or virtual card. If you still use a physical credit card, you can request a biometric card from your bank. But this technology — carrying a physical card on you when you shop — already feels antiquated. So, do experts predict that 2025 will be the year of biometric cards? Maybe — but not in the way you might think.

What is a biometric?

Biometrics use an analysis of your biological characteristics to confirm your identity. As a form of two-step authentication, biometric security scans your face, fingerprint or iris to confirm you are, well, you.

This technology is widely used today to verify your identity at airports, in hospitals and by various law enforcement agencies. Biometrics also help unlock your cell phone or laptop and log you into your favorite apps.

Whichever form of biometric lock you’re using, a device first creates a template of your biometric, like your fingerprint, then saves it onto the device and matches your scan to the template when you want to access it.

What about biometric credit cards?

Biometric cards may sound futuristic, but they’re actually just another step in a long evolution of credit card safety features. 

The first major advancement in card tech came from the Europay, Visa and Mastercard chip, or EMV chip, which gained popularity in the US in the mid-2010s. The gold-or-silved chip on the face of your card reduced counterfeit fraud by 76%, according to Visa.

Then contactless payments grew in popularity, followed by virtual and digital cards exploding in use in the 2020s. In Mastercard’s 2020 global payment study, 79% of people said that they use contactless payments, whether via a digital wallet or a tap-to-pay card functionality.

Biometrics are another layer of security that helps ensure only you can use your credit card.

Some virtual cards and smartphones already use a form of biometric technology, letting you use your face or fingerprint to unlock your device or confirm a payment via your digital wallet.

How do biometric cards work?

Similar to the way your biometrics are stored on your iPhone, your biometric information would be held within a scanner on your physical credit card, rather than on the cloud somewhere in the hands of a company. When you go to pay for an item, you’d place your fingerprint on your card’s scanner to approve the transaction.

If the device is compromised or stolen, there’s no way for someone to access your biometric data. Not even Visa would be able to access your face or fingerprint scan within the card.

Visa has been working with biometric technology for decades, and is now using biometrics to help digitize payments with Visa Payment Passkey — a digital payment experience that would house all of your credit, debit and banking information.

“One of our key tenants for anything we’re doing in biometrics — for both the Visa Payment Passkey and the physical biometric template on the card — it’s just stored on the individual device,” Mark Nelsen, Global Head of Consumer Payments at Visa told CNET. 

Because biometrics are just another form of authentication to be used with contactless payment, they’ll work with current contactless card readers.

Bringing credit cards up to speed

Biometric technology — even on credit cards — isn’t actually new.

“I had a biometric card 10 years ago,” Nelsen said. “And I was so proud, because I was using contactless payments when hardly anyone knew what that was.”

But back then, it wasn’t exactly a convenient way to pay. You had to put your finger on the built-in scanner, wait for that to work, then wait for the terminal to light up and confirm your payment.

According to Nelsen, the technology has had several hurdles on its way to mass implementation. If the goal of these cards was to make payments easier and safer without sacrificing convenience, the technology wasn’t keeping up.

“Ten years ago, the way that they thought this would work is you’d actually have a battery-powered card,” Nelsen said. “You would put your finger on the sensor and that would unlock the card, and then you could use it.” 

While they were able to add a battery to the piece of plastic, it wasn’t as cheap as manufacturing a card without any fancy tech attached, nor did it fit as easily into your wallet or pocket. Today, they’ve found a way to charge the scanner with the card reader, no battery attachment required. So why don’t we all have a biometric card? They’re expensive to manufacture.

“That’s why it’s taken so long to perfect this,” Nelsen said. “It’s an expensive technology, and so the card itself is just much more expensive than a traditional card.”

Are biometric credit cards safer than other credit cards?

The thing is, biometric cards solve a problem that isn’t nearly as prevalent as it once was: physical credit card fraud. While it still does exist (this is your friendly reminder to check the gas station for card skimmers) physical fraud isn’t nearly as common as it was just a few years ago.

Back then, cards used magnetic strips to contain card information and facilitate payments. Swiping your card was the primary way to pay, but mag strips were relatively easy to counterfeit. However, since the introduction of EMV chip cards, physical card fraud has decreased significantly.

In fact, 93% of fraudulent charges occurred while the card was still in the possession of its rightful owner, according to security.org. That means bad actors were able to obtain your card information without having the actual credit card.

“There are so many other technologies now to really deal with that lost or stolen card problem, so you’re left with biometrics as being a little bit more of a niche product for someone who is maybe hyper-security conscious,” Nelsen said.

Yet niche as it may be, there are those who would love to use this technology.

“I’d absolutely like to see it and would use it,” said Adam Levin, a security expert, author and co-host of the podcast What the Hack with Adam Levin. “From my perspective, one can never have enough arrows in our security quiver.”

Should you get a biometric card in 2025?

Technically, biometric credit cards are already here. If you’re especially security conscious, Nelsen said you could contact your bank to ask about getting a credit card with a fingerprint scanner.

He said Visa has a card with a biometric sensor on it that banks can request on your behalf. “And if you used it, we would recognize [the transaction]. When it hits our network and we see the transaction, we would recognize it and process it,” he added.

Mastercard’s website says that it’s also working on biometric scanners on physical cards but didn’t say whether the cards are currently available to the public. Instead, Mastercard said to look to your bank for more information, particularly if you’re a premium customer.

Biometric card scanners are an “up-and-coming solution” that would eliminate the need for a PIN or signature, Dennis Gamiello, executive vice president of identity at Mastercard, told CNET in an emailed response.

Will biometric credit cards be widely available in 2025?

While physical biometric cards might not see wide adoption rates in the US, countries like the UK and Canada have different regulations for credit card payments that could increase their use there.

“There are a couple of markets around the world where you actually can’t use your plastic card up to a limit,” Nelsen said. “A biometric scan would allow you to surpass that limit.”

For example, Canada has a CA$100 limit for transactions. France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK all have a 50€ limit. The US has no set national limit for what you can charge with a contactless payment.

While we may not see an influx of biometric cards in the US within the next few years, it’s possible we’ll see wider adoption in other countries. And if past advances in card technology have taught us anything, the US is usually a few years behind what happens in other markets.

Look at contactless payments and EMV chip technology, for example. The first form of contactless payment was introduced in Seoul in 1995, but contactless payments didn’t hit the US until 2004. EMV chip technology was adopted by Europe in the ’90s, but it wasn’t widely adopted in the US until 2015.

If you’re interested in getting a biometric card, talk to your bank. In addition to Visa’s offerings, other card manufacturers, including Thales and SmartMetric, advertise biometric cards. But you’ll need your card issuer to request one.

Do biometric cards make sense given the rise of digital payments? 

At least for the next few years, we’re still likely to have physical cards to carry in our wallets. While virtual credit cards, digital wallets and Visa Payment Passkey have done plenty to reduce the need for a physical card, experts don’t expect plastic and metal cards to vanish completely in the next year.

Nelsen said that he doesn’t see physical cards going away for a long time. There are a lot of markets and infrastructure set up around physical cards, so they won’t disappear anytime soon. However, he acknowledged that Visa is more focused on digital experiences.

“What’s the future of cards in general? It depends on the market and the consumer. I think in general, as more payments become digital, there isn’t a physical plastic piece of card to use. And so just the trend would be continued to see more digital use cases and digital wallets.”