Ever see that IBM commercial where IBM’s supercomputer system Watson recognizes Ken Jennings’ face, and he’s shocked by this?

Facial recognition is rapidly becoming a greater part of the landscape thanks to its potential as a biometric security measure, and Mitek recently got in that game itself by adding mobile facial recognition to its Photo Verify system.

Photo Verify has already made something of a name for itself as an instant ID project for document verification, but with the new addition of mobile facial recognition, it should step up identification to an even greater level.

The company’s managing director and IT strategist, Michael Hagen, noted that the new service would allow businesses to “…quickly and easily verify that a mobile user’s identity document is authentic and that they are the person pictured is on that document.”

Mitek is showing the system off at the Money 20/20 conference currently taking place in Las Vegas, which is a great place to show off a system that can pin down that the picture on an ID is indeed a match for the person holding the document.

What really isn’t said here—and it may be said before too much longer—is the kind of impact that this could have on mobile payments. Consider the kind of value that a facial verification system could have for authentication; only your face unlocks the payment system and allows payment to be made. That’s some pretty high-end protection, and just the kind of thing that might get people even more interested in mobile payments.

Security has long been a concern for potential mobile payments users, and with the username / password combination on a rapid decline, something needs to step in and provide the kind of protection users want. Biometrics have been a major part of the push away from passwords, though most of biometrics have been focused on fingerprints or thumbprints.

We’ve already seen this start to emerge, so it’s not surprising that facial recognition is also coming into play. Getting facial recognition to be part of a larger protection scheme could be valuable in the end, especially if it’s one of several barriers to unauthorized entry.

Facial recognition hasn’t always worked; many remember the disaster that was Ice Cream Sandwich’s facial recognition system that was beaten by the simple expedient of presenting a photograph of the person in question. When the system can’t tell the difference between a person and a photo of a person, there’s trouble afoot. But Ice Cream Sandwich’s debacle was almost five years ago, and systems have only gotten better since. Whether they’re ready to protect our money or not, however, remains to be seen.