The card scheme says it recently held a closed pilot to understand the consumer experience around voice and facial recognition.

"We created a beta mobile app which we tested in ane-commerce environment on over 14,000 transactions," says MasterCard. "The test group, drawn from MasterCard employees around the world, used both Android and iOS operating systems. The results were very exciting, yielding a successful verification rate of 98%, mixing a combination of voice and facial recognition."

The process usually took less than 10 seconds.

With the first wave of apps utilising Apple's TouchID fingerprint recognition system coming to market - both US neo-bank Simple and PFM outfit Mint have shipped their first iOS upgrades to incorporate the technology - biometric verification is beginning to gain currency among businesses and consumers as a useful tool in the fight against fraud. Earlier this month, Barclays launched a biometric reader for corporate client log-in using vein authentication technology from Hitachi.

"The launch of Apple Pay will start to bring true scale to the next generation of payments authentication." says MasterCard: "Our challenge is to take lessons from the different applications of biometrics already in place and elevate them into the next generation of authentication, not just for one platform, but for the mass market globally."

MasterCard already has first hand experience of a mass-market implementation of biometric card technology with the recent launch of the Nigerian eID card scheme, which combines payment card functionality with a mix of fingerprint, facial and iris recognition.