PayPal brings fingerprint payments to the phone

You have almost certainly tried to buy something online and failed to remember your PayPal username or password. That happens far more often than you would think, and every time it does, a sale is at risk.

From April, customers with a Samsung Galaxy S5 could pay on any site or in any shop accepting PayPal with nothing more than a swipe of a finger.

Killing the password

The goal of the companies in the FIDO Alliance was to end the dependence on insecure passwords, and most smartphones were expected to carry fingerprint readers before long for exactly that reason. The idea was that people could pay both in physical shops and online with their fingerprint.

The phone carried a biometric reader in the home button that digitised the fingertip, improving device security and making fraud harder. Samsung and PayPal built the FIDO Ready software connecting the phone's reader to PayPal's service, so people could identify themselves and pay.

Why it mattered to online shops

Every step you remove from a checkout increases the number of people who finish it. Forgotten passwords were, at the time, one of the largest single causes of abandoned purchases on mobile. Removing that step was worth more to conversion rates than most redesigns.