Using a PIN for cash withdrawals and credit card transactions will soon seem as old-fashioned as signing your name.The Payments Association of SA has announced a new standard for biometric authentication, which will mean fingerprints, palms, voices, irises and even faces can be used to identify cardholders.But the association says it has no plans to force businesses to use the technology, and none of the big banks has plans to use biometrics.Association CEO Walter Volker said the new standard meant biometric systems would not be limited to individual vendors."Through this inter-operable biometric verification standard we can connect a complicated web of players who operate with different technologies," said Mark Elliott, head of MasterCard SA, which joined Visa to work on the new standard with the association.Payments authentication has progressed from signatures to PINs, to chip-and-PIN cards, and Volker said fingerprints would be next, as they were more secure and convenient.The technology would be enforced only when there was large-scale deployment.Bob Reany, global boss of identity solutions at MasterCard, predicted the first biometrics payment could happen as early as this year, because smaller players wanted to innovate to be seen as "cool".The new system will enable fingerprints to be accepted by a reader, encrypted, then validated.Reany said it would prevent fraud...