Forbes, 4-17-2017 -- Imagine driving through toll booths, drive thru restaurants and gas stations without having to fiddle around with cash and coins. The future is calling for a world in which payments are seamless and with the experimentation and the introduction of self-driving cars, your car being in sync with your bank account is where technology is heading. Imagine if your car was your wallet.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has recently overtaken General Motors to become the most valuable car company in the US. According to Reuters, Tesla ended yesterday with a stock market value of nearly $51 billion which was $1 million more than GM. At the end of 2015, Juniper Research predicted that self-driving cars will take off by the year 2021 and there will be approximately 20 million vehicles on the road by 2025. With the emergence and rapid success of Tesla, these predictions could become a reality.

However, Juniper ranked Tesla as the third most promising player in the driverless car market, below Google and Volvo, after being in development for the longest and having logged the most autonomous miles. I spoke to representatives from FIS and SAP to find out what technology they are working on to ensure society has in-car payments in the future.

This technology, as Brown explained, is all voice-activated and as many predict the rise of biometric technology in payments, this could be how the boom cements itself in society. Brown said that a ‘voice-print’ would enable you to authenticate yourself or a payment account and pay for a transaction ‘hands-free’. ‘This is essential to the safety of in car payments,’ Brown said. A recent New York Times article discussed how soon a car will be able to read a human’s expression because of biometrics.

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