A tough sell
Payments alone are a tough sell for biometrics.
“The highest sign-up rates anyone has managed to
get are about 1 percent to 2 percent,” says Jeff
Wakefield, a vice president at terminal
manufacturer VeriFone Holdings. VeriFone teamed
with Pay By Touch in a joint development and
marketing initiative several years ago, but the
program never took off. VeriFone also made
overtures to purchase Pay By Touch late last
year, but a deal never materialized.
“Biometrics doesn’t seem to have enough of a
driver on the financial institutions side,”
Wakefield says. There isn’t a strong payback, he
suggests, especially when bankers consider that
biometrics can provide retailers with access to
lower-cost payment systems like ACH.
Another sticking point: personal privacy
concerns. Biometrics remains something of “a
public perception problem,” says Wakefield.
Fingerprinting raises red flags with people
because of its association with criminals.
plusID, however, doesn’t use fingerprints: it
scans the ridges, valleys and curves in a
person’s finger and converts that information to
encrypted data points. The resulting data cannot
be used to recreate a fingerprint, Petze says.
When data points on a scanned finger match the
data on the customer’s plusID fob, it triggers
the release of an access code or other
authorization information (the Pay By Touch
platform worked similarly).
“If you lose it, nobody else can use it,” Petze
says, and the tokens can be recycled and
reprogrammed for use by others.
Nonetheless, finger printing/scanning is not a
process that’s easily explained to consumers.
Green Hills customers may not have been troubled
about providing finger scans for SmartShop, but
that experience is unusual, Holland says.
“Fingerprint-based biometrics certainly has some
unwelcome connotations” for consumers, he says.
|
