Online transaction company PayPal is confident Australians will be quick to embrace its upcoming fingerprint-based smartphone payment system.
On Monday, PayPal and Samsung announced a partnership in which users of the newly-unveiled Galaxy S5 will be able to verify PayPal payments simply by rolling their fingertip across a sensor embedded in the home button.
The system, which eliminates the need to remember logins and passwords, will be ready as soon as the new phone begins shipping in early April.
Australia is one of 26 countries that will have immediate access to the fingerprint payment system, and John Lunn, PayPal's senior director of development, said he expected it will be met warmly.
Australians are early adopters, he said, "especially in the smartphone market".
"Mobile payments are big in Australia."
"We have very high billing penetration into Australian retailers. There's PayPal pretty much everywhere in Australia now."
The Galaxy S5 is the second major smartphone to incorporate a fingerprint sensor. Apple's iPhone 5s, released in September, also has one, but it can only be used to authenticate payments in Apple's own app store.
Apple is rumoured to be working on its own electronic payment system to rival those of companies such as PayPal.
In the meantime, the partnership between PayPal and Samsung takes fingerprint-verification to the next level, opening its use to potentially millions of vendors worldwide.
But why should people use it?
"It's quicker - that's the first thing," Lunn says. "All you do is put your finger on the screen.
"It's so much easier than (entering) a username or password, or even worse, a credit card number, billing address, shipping address - no one's got time for that."
Security is another selling point: "Fingerprinting has been used by police for years, it's obviously a good mechanism."
As for concerns about privacy, Lunn says users shouldn't worry.
"The important thing about this announcement is that none of your biometric data is stored on that phone.
"It's not storing your fingerprints locally. It takes your fingerprint, encrypts it, sends it to PayPal, they decrypt it, checks its the same, and then you're authenticated.
"It's very very secure."
The partnership taps into an exponential growth in mobile payments. While most payments are still conducted via regular computers, more and more people are using their phones to pay for things.
PayPal oversaw $US27 billion worth of mobile payments in 2013. That was more than double the $US14 billion of 2012, and more than quadruple the $US6 billion of 2011.
"It's pretty much doubling every year," Lunn says.
"Once you use this, you won't want to use usernames and passwords again."
*Paddy Wood travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Samsung.
