Why the weakest point in payments security is still the moment of sale

The payments industry has spent decades hardening its defences, and fraud losses are still rising. Global card fraud reached $33.41 billion in 2024, on course for $41 billion by 2030, and the EBA and ECB recorded €4.2 billion in fraudulent EEA transactions in their 2025 report, up 17% year-on-year.

Most of that investment sits after the transaction, in fraud detection and chargeback management. These systems are sophisticated, and by definition reactive. Authentication at the physical point of sale has not kept pace. The dominant method remains the PIN, a static, shareable number largely unchanged since the 1960s, and the fastest-growing fraud types now exploit that gap rather than payment infrastructure itself.

For merchants, the case for better authentication is commercial as much as experiential. Replacing a credential that can be stolen or coerced with a live biometric reduces fraud, chargebacks and the overhead that comes with both.

The answer is architectural. Handwave combines dual-camera palm imaging and active liveness detection with tokenisation, so identity, payment and loyalty resolve in under a second and no biometric is retained on the merchant side. The authentication gap is known, measurable and addressable, and it no longer has to be the weakest point in the chain.