According to this Reuters report, Apple has made a bid to acquire a company that designs fingerprint sensor technology. I'd say there's no doubt Apple has big plans to leverage all those credit cards they've stored up over the years.

The launch of the Passbook app with the release of iOS 6 in the fall will be the first step. I'd expect the implementation of NFC and this kind of verification technology to follow in subsequent hardware releases. Most likely in 2013 or 2014.