Visa launches payment passkey in India

Multinational digital payments network Visa on Thursday launched the Visa Payment Passkey in India, a new authentication solution designed to make digital payments more secure, trusted, and seamless.

"It lays the foundation for the next generation of intelligent commerce while delivering immediate value for today's everyday digital payments," Suresh Sethi, group country manager (India and South Asia), Visa, said, during the launch.

"In this new world, authentication cannot be made dependent on passwords, one-time codes designed for an earlier digital era. It must be found secured by design, invisible to the consumer and resilient against sophisticated fraud," he added.

Alongside Mastercard and participating commercial banks and fintech companies in India, the coming of passkeys in India is seen as a move which will reduce the dependence on vulnerable solutions such as one-time-passwords (OTP) and phishing-led frauds.

"We are trying to make sure that while we solve for convenience, we bring trust and safety by design into the ecosystem," Ramakrishnan Gopalan, Visa's vice president and head of products and solutions (India and South Asia) said.

Built on the foundation which the Reserve Bank of India recognised and approved, Gopalan said that they did not need to create a new technology. It is based on the FIDO (fast identity digital online) framework, which has been adopted by over 250 countries worldwide.

A passkey is a FIDO authentication credential based on FIDO standards, which allows individuals to sign in to apps and websites, in the same way that they do to unlock a mobile phone (biometric, PIN or pattern). Passkeys are FIDO cryptographic credentials that are tied to a user’s account on a website or application. So the individual does not need to enter usernames and passwords.

"We at Visa believe that the human-led commerce model that exists today will over time change into a human-in-the middle-commerce assisted by an agent and sometime in the future, become 100% autonomous," Gopalan said. "The transition is taking place and passkeys will pave the way for the transition."

The Visa passkey was made live first with IDFC FIRST Bank, which will be followed by other commercial banks.

From the ecommerce side, it is being made available on platforms including Myntra, Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and Tata Starbucks, besides others. The fintech partners include Juspay, Razorpay, PayU, Pine Labs, and BillDesk besides others.

India currently has 1.4 million biometric enabled Aadhaar identities where digital payments forms the trust layer of digital transactions.