India becomes world's most tokenised online card market as Visa launches Payment Passkey
Visa introduced Payment Passkey in Mumbai, swapping OTPs for biometric authentication on online card transactions. India now leads globally with 900M+ payment tokens, including 500M Visa tokens, reshaping retail checkout security and payment rails.
What happened
Visa launched Payment Passkey in Mumbai, enabling biometric authentication over OTPs for online card transactions. India is now the world's most tokenised
Key facts
- 900 million payment tokens
- 500 million Visa tokens
Why this matters
Visa's Payment Passkey launch and India's tokenization dominance create partnership and acquisition opportunities in biometric authentication and secure checkout technology providers.
What to watch
- RBI guidance or mandates on biometric authentication and token liability
- Published conversion-rate and fraud-reduction metrics from early Passkey merchants
- Mastercard/RuPay/UPI competing biometric launches
- Device coverage stats (Android/iOS passkey support in India install base)
- Any reported biometric spoof, token-vault incident, or consumer trust survey shift
- Merchants prioritize Passkey SDK integration to lower cart abandonment and capture conversion lift
- PSPs and gateways (Razorpay, PayU, Juspay) bundle passkey orchestration as a differentiator
- Mastercard and RuPay accelerate competing biometric/token products to avoid conversion gap
- Banks push token provisioning at issuance to lock in default-card status in wallets
- Retailers A/B test passkey vs OTP flows and quantify checkout speed and fraud deltas