Biometric Testing Beneath the Skin
A Japanese card and payments firm is trialling biometric verification that goes further than skin-deep.
Tokyo-based JCB said it is testing biometric verification by using both palm prints and vein patterns to identify users. The trial will use technology from Universal Robot's visible light palm authentication, using both hand print and vein patterns. The tech firm claims the world's highest level of accuracy at only 1 in 100 billion wrong verifications.
The move shows how banks are adopting emerging technology to simplify financial transactions, as well as make them more secure: other firms have adopted iris scanning, voice recognition, or even, in the case of HSBC, «selfies» to identify users.
The Japanese trial will focus on testing technical aspects such as caching a customer's palm print and vein patterns with a smartphone camera, storing them on a server, authenticating, and returning the results to the smartphone.
JCB will be studying how to utilize the authentication technology for a wide variety of services, while only requiring the customer to register their palm information in the authentication server once via their smartphone, the Japanese firm said in a press release.
