Handwave, Visa link palm biometrics to cards for payments

Latvian startup Handwave has expanded its partnership with Visa to integrate tokenization and authentication technology, letting users link bank cards directly to their palm biometrics for in-person payments, with pilots planned across Baltic banks and retailers ahead of wider European and US rollout. This deepens the move toward biometric identity replacing physical cards as the standard method of payment authorization. Such infrastructure, once normalized across major card networks, builds the technical foundation for systems where access to buying and selling depends on verified biometric identity.