Tech Advances for a New Century – Fingerprints as Credit Cards

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FingerImagine going to your local Starbucks and instead of having to rummage through your wallet in the morning, simply pressing your finger to a scanner and walking out. Headache averted. Want to know more?  Read on for a 4-minute history and update on Scanning for Payment.

For years various companies have developed innovative, “easy” payment options for purchases at locations ranging from retail stores, to restaurants, to public transportation systems, to small-personal merchants. Businesses life Flock Tag, Square, and others, all feature an accessible, simple ability to allow the fast swipe of a card for payment or – bringing access to individuals and businesses who never accepted credit cards for payment before this due to the clunky technology and equipment.  Now it’s as easy as a 1” “square” and an app on your SmartPhone.  Yes, commerce has definitely come to the masses.

Square sends its user a card reader which plugs into the head phone dock on smart phones, allowing for users, usually small business owners, the ability to charge sales to cards. Square offers two payment options, either a rate fee per transaction or a flat $275 monthly charge.

Breeze Cards are re-loadable magnetized cards used in the Rail system in Atlanta, Georgia. The cards differ from Subway passes in cities like New York, in that they are reusable; by simply swiping your Breeze card at a kiosk you are able to add rides to the card, which is then swiped upon entering and leaving the “Marta”- subway.  This is a huge win for green ecology, all but eliminating the waste of use and use-up passes for other systems, like New York.

The Flock Tag is a step further in this brave new world.  It is a “customer loyalty program,” originated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which aims to replace all promotion cards at local stores that keep count of purchases – basically it works like this:  Buy 10 smoothies and get your 11th free.  To make it even easier, it combines all stores into one loyalty card.  The card is simply swiped after you pay and works with its corresponding phone application to track purchases and promotions.  What do ALL of these various cards have in common? They all represent new “revolutionary” forms of payment, and promotion, aimed at simplifying the payment process for consumers worldwide.

While all these cards are revolutionary in their own rights, engineering students at The School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, a small university in South Dakota, may be in the process of outdoing them all with their implementation of fingerprint scanners as payment.  

And while there are privacy issues with this sort of technology, what could be more convenient than paying for your purchases by swiping your finger?

To good to be true? It keeps getting better. If this type of finger payment elicits memories from movies in which someone steals your finger, and you can’t cancel a finger like you can a credit card, the engineers in Rapid City are implementing a live hemoglobin check in the scanner, so only “live” fingers can be used as payment.  Gross, maybe?  Effective and thought provoking?  You bet.

Until next time,

Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

 

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