Future Tech!

Future Tech.

There biggest challenge in the online transactions world, be it in financial services  or E commerce or cyber forensics is to establish authenticity of users. KYC, personal profiling, digital profiling and number of practices abound. All of them have loopholes and always some one cracks through the system  and abuses it.

One of the tools used for profiling is biometrics. Fingerprint pattern identification or iris pattern identification is the most accurate tool today to establish identity.

I throw a question to banks and financial institutions today - why do we need ATM cards and credit cards which are prone to be stolen or hacked into to transact. Why is here a need for a physical card? Why don't banks introduce a finger print identification at an ATM that gives access to bank accounts by recording a finger print at the tike on client on boarding and using that as a unique identifier for all transactions for that customer with the bank!

This will eliminate identity theft, card theft, and a whole lot of security challenges. The technology is available, is low cost and scalable. Imagine a scenario where individuals don't need to use cards at an atm, but just needs to walkin and press his/her thumbs against a biometric scanner on the atm machine to unlock the account and transact.

This will eliminate need to carry many cards, increase account safety and reduce cost of cards based infrastructure completely. This will disrupt the credit card and debit card industry but will not eliminate them. In fact it will eliminate plastic card makers but not credit issuers like visa or master but on the other side will make issuing credit a lot more safer and bring significant credibility and accountability into the credit process and card based transaction process this benefitting such organisations.

The simple question is,  why then are banks not using this yet. The answer is some one need to start.