There's a wave of latent demand for biometric checkout. Here's what's holding it back.

Oskars Lakšēvics, Chief Commercial Officer @Handwave

Payments technology has always moved in waves - roughly every decade. In the 1990s, chip cards replaced magnetic stripes. In the early 2000s, NFC transformed cards into contactless devices. By 2012, mobile wallets brought NFC into smartphones, and with it, biometric authentication entered everyday commerce for the first time.

Mobile wallets have achieved global scale and normalised the idea of paying with your face or fingerprint. But they still require a device. The shift now underway moves beyond that entirely - toward biometrics-only experiences where you pay or authenticate with who you are, not what you have.

The payments industry is at a similar inflection point now. In March 2026, Handwave published new research surveying 2,001 US consumers which found that 48% polled say they would use palm payments regularly, if they were confident their data was handled securely. In Miami and New York, over half already say they're comfortable paying by palm while in Las Vegas, one in ten are already doing it. The data clearly shows that palm payments are not merely a niche curiosity, but rather indicative of latent demand on a significant scale.

A question of trust

It's worth establishing what's actually at stake when it comes to biometric payments. When payment, loyalty activation, and age verification each require a separate interaction, checkout routinely runs to over 60 seconds. Aggregated across global retail, that friction accounts for an estimated 37 billion hours lost by shoppers annually - and $555 billion in losses to retailers from slower throughput and abandoned transactions.

Palm authentication collapses those three steps into a single gesture, completing in under a second. Total checkout time drops to under four seconds, which makes the commercial case clear. It’s the adoption case however, where it gets complicated.

When consumers were asked what puts them off biometric payments, the answers highlighted one primary theme: data misuse. Fear of breaches or hacking topped the list at 55%, while 41% indicated concerns about how biometric data might be used. Hostile actors weren’t the only source of concern, with 32% expressing distrust of retailers to handle the system responsibly.

The architecture has to be the answer

Consumers are not afraid the technology won't work. They're afraid of what happens to their data when it does. Trust in the institutions most associated with this technology is already strained, with just 38% of those surveyed trusting tech companies to handle facial recognition data responsibly.

The wider picture corroborates this. Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer Survey found that only around one in ten consumers say they are very willing to share sensitive data including biometric data, and GetApp found that trust in tech companies to keep biometric data safe fell from 28% to just 5% between 2022 and 2024. Yet behaviour tells a different story - mobile wallet adoption already exceeds 25–30% in many markets, with millions using biometrics daily to unlock phones and authorise payments.

The issue isn't convincing people to use biometrics. It's building systems trustworthy enough to extend that comfort beyond the device, and where the privacy question has a structural answer. On the technology side, it is important to consider both what a system does and what it doesn't do. Unlike some biometric payment providers, Handwave does not store images. The dual-camera system captures both the palm surface and sub-dermal vein pattern, with liveness detection built in, but what the platform retains is a cryptographic token, not a biometric record. There is simply nothing meaningful to leak.

This is reinforced by the legal framework. Built under GDPR - one of the strictest data protection regimes in the world - privacy-by-design is Handwave's competitive advantage over providers operating under less rigorous standards. Nor is it being built alone: our security layer is being developed in partnership with Visa, adding a further layer of trust and robustness.

The timing is right

The infrastructure is already there. Tokenised, biometric-ready payments are now standard across the major card schemes, and the shift is accelerating. Built in Europe, under GDPR, privacy-by-design is the key operating constraint Handwave was built around, and can set a global standard.

It is precisely this privacy-first approach that half of all consumers say would bring them on board. The demographic tailwind points in the same direction: consumers aged 16–34 show significantly higher biometric trust than over-55s. The trust gap is partly generational, and it's closing.

The merchants, acquirers and payment providers that build trust-first biometric infrastructure now are not just solving for today's consumer. They're positioning for the default payment behaviour of the next decade.