Samsung’s Galaxy S8 flagship smartphone “will employ facial-recognition technology for mobile payments within months of release,” Bloomberg reports. The handset, due to be unveiled on 29 March, will “blend fingerprint, iris and facial detection to verify users accessing mobile services including Samsung Pay”. Apple’s iPhone 7S, 7S Plus and 8 are also expected to come equipped with facial recognition later this year to replace the Touch ID fingerprint scanner.
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I expect that it will prove to be more accurate to say that these additional forms of evidence will be used to authenticate the user to the device which will then vouch for the user to the app, similar to the way that finger-print is used today. That is, the app invokes the API to re-authenticate the user using the mechanism of the device and its OS.
Keep in mind that we use biometrics because they improve convenience while maintaining security. One advantage of visage over finger-print is that it can be more transparent to the user, Said another way, it might not require a prompt to the user. Another might be that it could resist replay by detecting “liveless” in the image.