Biometrics and financial services, smart guns, cybersecurity and facial recognition trending this week

Here is a recap of the most popular biometrics industry news that appeared on BiometricUpdate.com this past week.

Financial

A new report by Juniper Research titled “Top 10 disruptive technologies in fintech: 2016” discusses technologies that will do the most to transform e-commerce this year and topping the list are biometrics, federated identity and tokenisation. The report highlights the use of biometric authentication in both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and the proliferation of fingerprint readers in smartphones as making the biggest difference to ‘payment completion’ today.

New research from MasterCard shows New Zealanders are embracing digital payments with 49% expecting mobile devices, biometrics and wearables to replace cash in ten years’ time. “New Zealanders are early adopters of technology and are increasingly seeking fast, convenient and secure ways to pay,” says Peter Chisnall, MasterCard New Zealand country manager.

SmartMetric, Inc. has been invited to present its biometric payments card technology at the upcoming Smart Card Alliance Payments Summit in Orlando, Florida. SmartMetric’s biometric payments card fits a fully functional fingerprint reader inside an EMV smart card. A thin sensor on the card’s surface is used to read the person’s fingerprint and match it with their fingerprint already stored in the card.

Tony Chew, Citibank’s global head of cybersecurity regulatory strategy, recently spoke about the need for banks to adopt biometric authentication solutions for mobile users instead of using PINs and SMS-based OTPs (one-time passwords). Chew said it was “absurd” that most banks still rely on passwords and PINs to authenticate customers, and criticized OTPs as being an inconvenient method for authenticating transactions.

The new Visa Developer platform is designed to drive innovation in payments and commerce, offering access to hundreds of Visa APIs and SDKs for some of Visa’s most popular payment technologies and services including account holder identification, person-to-person payment capabilities, secure in-store and online payment services such as Visa Checkout, currency conversion and consumer transaction alerts.

Goode Intelligence published its Biometrics for Financial Services analyst report series, which among other things identifies the top five trends that are driving the adoption of biometrics for financial services. The series features three separate analyst reports detailing the adoption of biometric technology across a range of financial services, as well as as exploring biometrics for banking, payments and mobile.

Patents

A newly published Samsung patent titled “Wearable Device and Method of Operating the Same” describes a wearable device with a sensor that includes an infrared light source and camera that captures a vein image of the user, which is processed and used to identify the user. If the vein image captured matches at least one registered vein image, a specific function or application would be run.

Apple was recently granted a U.S. patent entitled “Force-Sensitive Fingerprint Sensing Input“, which will expand the Touch ID home button’s functionality. According to the patent application, the technology could allow the Touch Button ID home button to perform different actions based on different fingerprints, as well as adding pressure sensors to enable 3D Touch type functionality.

Fingerprint technology

IDEX ASA announced this week that it has received an initial commercial volume production order for its Cardinal touch fingerprint sensor for a tier-one mobile handset. This production order follows the IDEX’s design win announced last December with the OEM smartphone manufacturer for a device to be distributed by an unnamed major wireless carrier. IDEX expects to commence shipments to fulfill the order during the second quarter of 2016.

Goodix CTO Dr. Bo Pi, noted in an interview with BiometricUpdate.com that the company will release two new, innovative products at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, which will include: a fingerprint sensor that integrates liveness detection to effectively stop spoofing through use of moulds or high-image photos; and a new optical sensor that will be integrated into an earpiece, which seamlessly measures a user’s pulse rate.

Credentials

Kathleen Carroll, chair of the Security Industry Association’s (SIA) Government Relations Committee made recommendations to Congress last week regarding strengthening security credentials at U.S. airports. Carroll called for wider adoption of biometric confirmation of identity for badge issuance and for airport worker credentials to follow a federated model.

Cybersecurity

President Barack Obama outlined his Cybersecurity National Action Plan featuring an expanded cybersecurity budget, a new federal chief information security officer, and an emphasis on promoting multi-factor authentication. The White House aims to modernize US government IT security and privacy with a Federal Privacy Council, investment in new technology, and partnerships with industry stakeholders like the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).

Facial recognition

Cognitec’s FaceVACS-VideoScan facial recognition solution is strengthening physical security measures in Melco Crown Entertainment casinos in Macau by alerting security staff in real time about banned persons entering the premises. Cognitec helped deploy the technology on site. The software solution uses advanced face recognition technology to detect people’s faces in live video streams and compare them to databases of banned persons.

Patient identification

Florida House Bill 1299 includes a provision that would require Florida hospitals to install software that allows them to use biometrics and the state driver’s license database to verify Medicaid patients identification. Medicaid is a social health care program for families and individuals with low income and limited resources.

Smart gun symposium

Washington Ceasefire and Smart Tech Challenges Foundation are bringing together leading smart gun developers and proponents to discuss the potential of smart guns to save lives and the resources needed to make them a reality. The International San Francisco Smart Gun Symposium will be held on February 23. Panels at the symposium will focus on law enforcement and smart gun adoption and what is needed to make smart guns a reality.

Smartphones

According to Acuity Market Intelligence, more than 200 different smartphones incorporating fingerprint, iris, and eye-vein biometrics have been introduced since Q1 2013 under 70 brand names including Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, TCL, Oppo, Vivo, and ZTE. Acuity projects that 600 million biometric smartphones are currently in use representing 28% of the global installed base.

Article Topics

Acuity  |  Apple  |  biometric payment system  |  biometrics  |  Cognitec  |  credentials  |  cybersecurity  |  fingerprint technology  |  fintech  |  Goode Intelligence  |  Goodix  |  Idex Biometrics  |  Mastercard  |  patents  |  patient identification  |  Samsung  |  Security Industry Association (SIA)  |  smart gun  |  SmartMetric  |  smartphones  |  Visa