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."

BioPassword has announced it has secured $11 million in Series C financing from new investor RRE Ventures and existing investors including Citrix Systems, Ignition Partners and OVP Venture Partners.

Becky Yerak reports for the Chicago Tribune on Pay By Touch, saying that the company "continues to attract financing and beef up its management ranks, recently adding a former Home Depot Inc. and Sears, Roebuck and Co. executive to its payroll." Yerak interviewed Pay By Touch President John Morris who said "this is one of the rare times where you can deliver identity theft prevention for the shopper, better security in terms of fraud for the retailer and increased convenience."

Kathleen Kingsbury reports for Time on biometrics as passwords. Kingsbury reports that "keystroke authentication is the newest offering from the field of biometrics--the measurement and analysis of unique physical or behavioral characteristics--and it's accurate 98% of the time."

Pay By Touch has announced that it has acquired S&H Solutions (S&H) and its parent company S&H greenpoints for a purchase price that was "in excess of $100 million in cash and stock." Pay By Touch sais the acquisition was "in keeping with its corporate strategy to acquire companies that complement its portfolio and provide
future growth opportunities."

Pay By Touch has announced that its Paycheck Secure service is now being offered to financial
institutions. Paycheck Secure is a biometric check-cashing service that can help banks and credit unions generate additional non-interest fee-based income while decreasing the risk of fraud and meeting regulatory compliance requirements.