On the web:

• India: Oxigen ties up with NPCI to unveil instant remittance service OxiCash for unbanked people - TechCircle.in - "OxiCash is a mobile wallet service through which people can make money transfers to any bank and also receive funds using the IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) platform of the NPCI…"
• Google Wallet chief leaves the company - VentureBeat - "Osama Bedier, the head of Google Wallet is out, according to several sources."
• Gay Bankers, Once Silent, Speak of Progress — and Hurdles - American Banker - "No one should be afraid to come to work every day as who they are, and no one should have to check who they are at the door…"
• PayPal’s John Lunn reveals how online retailers are using consumer data to beat high street stores - The Next Web - "…find out which startups are helping online retailers to maintain this market dominance, and what physical retailers should do next to fight back."
• Why mobile wallets alone will fail - Cyriac Roeding (shopkick CEO) - "The problem with mobile payments is that payment isn't a problem in the shopping world."
• Off The Schneid - AVC - "I've led a new venture investment for USV, which closed a few weeks ago and was announced last night. The company is Coinbase and my blog post announcing the investment is on the USV blog."
• Purchase, Deposit, and Bank from a Smartphone with Paidpiper - Programmable Web - "Paidpiper represents a new player to the field with a slightly different value proposition over some of its competitors."
• CardFlight Partners With Stripe And Launches SDK To Become The ‘Stripe Of Real-World Payments’ - TechCrunch - "Enter CardFlight, which is launching with an encrypted, Square-like card reader of its own, as well as an SDK and APIs that will allow developers to create apps and take “card-present” payments on their mobile apps."
• EMV Takes Center Stage on Day Two of THE Tech EVENT - Convenience Store News - "Several speakers stressed in today’s standing-room-only session that EMV is a set of guidelines, not standards."
• Prepaid Cards for Jobless Benefits - The Members Group - "…42 states in the U.S. now direct deposit monthly unemployment benefits to out-of-work consumers on reloadable prepaid cards…"
• Discover Card's Email Balance Alert is a Thing of Beauty - NetBanker - "The message is nicely laid out with plenty of white space and it's chock full of links to get more information."

On the wires:

• MasterCard to Power Nigerian Identity Card Program - "This program is the largest roll-out of a formal electronic payment solution in the country and the broadest financial inclusion initiative of its kind on the African continent."
• Wells Fargo Adds Bankers, Launches New Secured Credit Products to Help More Small Businesses - "Wells Fargo’s new Business Secured Credit Card also helps new businesses establish and rebuild business credit…"
• Tabbedout and Future POS Expand Partnership to Bring Unrivaled Merchant Marketing Solution to All Future Fusion Merchants - "This new partnership means that the Tabbedout merchant marketing solution, Periscope, is now available in the 4,000+ Future POS merchant locations that use the Future Fusion software in their restaurants, bars, and hotels…"
• Elavon Names Simon Haslam President and Chief Executive Officer - "Simon’s experience and passion for growth and innovation make him the best individual to lead Elavon as we continue to extend our global reach and the value we deliver to our customers."
• Barclays Uses Nuance Voice Biometrics to Identify Customers by the Sound of their Voice - "No longer will customers need to answer intrusive security questions in order to verify their identity. By simply speaking with an agent, a customer’s voice is verified using Nuance voice biometrics technology, making the authentication process quick, secure and transparent."

On the web:

• PayTango Aims To Make Payments Work Through Biometrics - TechCrunch

On the wires:

• Bluefin Payment Systems Announces Partnership with Commerce Science Corporation
• Bell State Bank & Trust Adds Mobile Payment, Mobile Deposit with Mobiliti from Fiserv
• SignaPay Partners with ControlScan for Stronger SMB Payment Security and Compliance
• GE Capital Retail Bank Extends Belk Private Label Credit Card Program
• BlueSnap Pushes Past Card-only Subscriptions to Increase Recurring Revenue Potential

InAuth announced availability of its native Voice Biometrics Authentication Module, an opt-in solution that leverages the voice “fingerprint” of a mobile-device user to secure their financial transactions.

“Like a fingerprint, each individual's voice is unique. Our new Voice Biometrics Authentication Module maps specific voice characteristics such as pitch and rhythm to accurately verify identity and convey confidence to financial institutions in the validity of their mobile user base,” said Mike Patterson, CEO, InAuth.

InAuth's new software solution runs unobtrusively on the mobile device of a financial institution's account user and dynamically identifies the user based on unique voice characteristics.

A recent online poll by Unisys reveals that U.S. consumers trust fingerprint biometrics over photo identification, PIN numbers or handwritten signatures to verify their identities when using a credit card or requesting personal information. "The online poll found that 63% of more than 300 respondents preferred fingerprints as the best method for identity verification and authentication as compared to photo identification (20%), PIN numbers (13%) and handwritten signatures (6%)."

Headline News is brought to you by Glenbrook Partners:

• American Express Canada Launches New Concept in Travel Rewards Cards
• Bank of America to Offer Merchants First Data Tokenization Solution
• FleetCor Announces the New Chevron and Texaco Universal Business MasterCard
• BB&T launches Remote Deposit Solution for Low-Check-Volume Businesses
• SafetyPay Expands Further Into Latin America with Braspag Partnership in Brazil
• New Celent Report on Mobile Contactless Payments in South Korea

• Planet Biometrics: Mexico Deploys Nationwide Voice Identification
• NetBanker: Top 25 Financial Institutions Ranked by US Web Traffic

A recent survey conducted by Unisys finds that "a majority of Americans are comfortable using common biometric technologies for authentication. More than 70 percent of respondents will trust banks and government agencies to ask them for biometric data for identity verification. Additionally, fingerprints nearly tied personal passwords as the primary preferred authentication method, 73 percent to 72 percent, respectively."

Mountain View, California-based Victrio has introduced "a new credit risk management solution that identifies fraudsters by their voice during credit card authorization phone calls. It works by comparing the callers’ voice against a database of known criminals. If there is a match, authorization can be denied before the damage is done. The company is targeting big-ticket online merchants as well as banks and other credit card issuers." READ MORE »

In a press release this morning, payment processor Equens and supermarket chain Albert Heijn have announced they will begin a pilot with Tip2Pay - pay with your fingertip. Both a debit card and your fingertip must be presented at the point-of-sale. READ MORE »

Accenture has announced that it has opened a new facility at its research and development technology lab in Sophia Antipolis, France, dedicated to innovation in the rapidly growing global payments industry. The facility, called the Accenture Payments Innovation Showcase, focuses on original research and development in all facets of the payments business, including mobile communications and other point-of-sale technology, bank-to-corporate connectivity, processing, process models, biometrics, regulation such as the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) initiative, and security. READ MORE »

The Sunday Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune has an article titled "Pay by Touch's backers claim fingers burned" by reporter Matt McKinney that takes a look back at Pay By Touch. On March 19, 2008, Pay By Touch shuttered its biometric-based payment service.

The archive of Pay By Touch-related stories here on Payments News begins over four years ago. It's interesting to scroll back (read from the bottom up) and look at the various partnerships, financings, trials, etc. that Pay By Touch announced along the way prior to shuttering its biometrics payment service at 11:59 PM last night.

We've received the following announcement from Pay By Touch: "Solidus Networks, Inc., dba Pay By Touch, regretfully announced today that it will no longer process biometric transactions on behalf of its merchant customers and consumer membership base, as 11:59:59pm March 19, 2008."

The World Resources Institute has published a report by Loretta Michaels titled "Biometric Security for Mobile Banking". "This report identifies a confluence of technology trends leading to viable solutions that can enable very widespread access to financial services. It also discusses the obstacles blocking the growth of this market among BoP consumers, such as mobile phone banking security."

ISO has published a standard to increase the security of financial transactions over electronic media. The new standard, ISO 19092:2008, Financial services – Biometrics – Security framework, establishes the security requirements for the implementation and management of state-of-the-art biometric identification technology within the financial industry.

Arik Hesseldahl reports for Business Week that "VeriFone has quietly expressed interest in buying the assets of Pay By Touch, a biometrics company currently in Chapter 11, according to court filings obtained by BusinessWeek.com."

In a post titled "Fingering Suspects", Dave Birch writes about the use of biometrics for payments - nothing that "the rapid acceptance of contactless payment cards by the incumbents essentially usurped the speed/convenience argument [of biometrics] away."

Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson writes: At Glenbrook, we often conclude one of our Payments Boot Camps with an informal poll of participants on their favored cash replacement form factor (mobile phone, fingerprint, etc.) At a private payments workshop in San Francisco last week, we were surprised by the strength of that group's response in favor of fingerprint. We decided to test it out (still pretty informally!) with a quick Facebook poll.

In an article titled 'Did Radio (Waves) Kill The Biometric Star?", Evan Schuman writes on his Storefront Backtalk blog about how "contactless payment and mobile payment efforts seem to have stunted the growth of retail biometrics." He notes that "the surprisingly rapid acceptance of contactless payment credit cards essentially usurped the speed/convenience argument away from the biometric people."

Murdo Macleod reports for The Scotsman about a new biometric authentication system from Hitachi that uses finger vein patterns - instead of fingerprints - for consumer authentication at the point of purchase.

The Economist profiles Nick Ogden and his company VoicePay, a provider of voice authentication-based mobile payments.

West Texas National Bank has announced that it has adopted Pay By Touch's biometric check cashing service. Paycheck Secure powered by Pay By Touch lets consumers use a finger scan to quickly and securely identify themselves to cash a government or payroll check.

EDS Fellow Randy Mears explores the use of voice biometrics for payment authentication - and VoicePay in particular. He notes the tradeoff between benefit to merchants vs. inconvenience to the buyer saying that "consumer is expected to do all the work but appears to receive little in return."

Duncan Graham-Rowe writes for the MIT Technology Review about Pay by Voice, a new payment service from Nick Ogden that uses biometric voice analysis to authenticate users. The article reports that "the biometric voice-print system behind Voice Pay was developed by Dublin-based Voice Vault" and the over 120,000 users have enrolled in the service since its launch about a month ago. Payments News covered the original announcement - then called Voice Pay - on April 30, 2007.

Voice Pay, calling itself the "world's first voice-verified payment processing system," has launched today. The company says its system uses the customer's own voice as a means of digitally signing and authorizing payments. It incorporates VoiceVault voice biometric authentication technology which is already in use by global banks, insurers and public sector organisations."

Ann Keeton reports for the Wall St. Journal about the expanding use of fingerprint biometrics. She reports that about "10% of new laptops sold in the U.S. come equipped with tiny, inexpensive fingerprint censors, eliminating the need for people to remember passwords."

This doesn't have anything immediately to do with payments - but it's potentially relevant and interesting nonetheless. Kwikset has introduced SmartScan, what the company calls "the world’s first residential biometric keyless entry system."

StoreNext Retail Technologies and Pay By Touch have announced an agreement under which the two companies will market and distribute Pay By Touch’s biometric authentication and payment service to independent grocers. The companies says that their joint solution "minimizes grocers’ transaction costs while allowing shoppers to pay for purchases with the simple touch of a finger."

Aite Group has announced a new report, Biometric Payments and Rewards: A Case Study, that provides an "in-depth review of the deployment of Pay By Touch technology at a grocery store named Green Hills." According to the report, "nine months after the introduction of Pay By Touch's SmartShop loyalty and payment solution, 25% of Green Hills' sales are made via biometric payments, and 28% of those are processed over the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network."

The PELORUS Group has published a new report titled "Alternative Payments: Changing The Rules" that concludes that "three emerging payment alternatives to the traditional magnetic stripe credit/debit card payments regime, when combined, hold the potential to significantly alter the payment landscape. Contactless credit and debit card payments (sometimes called proximity payments), mobile payments (m-Payments) and biometrically authenticated payments will each levy its own unique impact over the next five years. Together, they could garner over $400 billion in revenue by 2011." [Editor's note: I suspect that's payment volume on those instruments, not revenue.]

TRUSTe has announced the results of a consumer survey that concludes that eighty-two percent of Americans support the use of biometric identification on passports, three-quarters of Americans support the addition of biometric information to driver's licenses and nearly as many (72.6 percent) support adding it to Social Security cards. Three out of five Americans support adding biometric data to credit cards (64 percent) and debit cards (62 percent), but are much less likely to want that information on a retail store loyalty card (27 percent). This corresponds to other findings in the survey that 76 percent of respondents trusted banks and financial institutions "always" or "most of the time" as compared to 41 percent of respondents trusting retail stores "always" or "most of the time."