UniCredit roll out biometric payment system

Fujitsu Technology Solutions has entered into an agreement with UniCredit, the Italy-based European banking group, to make UniCredit the first customer for its PalmSecure authentication system.

As part of the deal, UniCredit will roll out the system in Italy as means of payment authorisation, dubbed Papillon. In that case, users enrolled in the system will be able to pay by holding their hand over a scanner on suitably equipped point-of-sale (POS) terminals, without the need for a card or PIN.

The Papillon payment system has already been tested. The bank’s CEO Federico Ghizzoni has made the first payment on a pilot system at an Italian store belonging to upmarket cosmetics chain Kiko in mid-December 2012.

PalmSecure, already tested with banks in Japan, uses an infrared sensor to scan the pattern of veins in the palm of the hand from a distance of about 5 centimeters, converting the result into a digital code. The system also detects the flow of blood through the veins, defending against the kind of fake-finger attacks that have bedeviled fingerprint authentication systems and making it pointless for thieves to cut off authorised users’ body parts in order to defeat access control systems. PalmSecure’s scanners can either be linked to a central back-end database with a separate enrollment system, more appropriate in a banking environment, or the functions of enrollment and authentication can be combined in an embedded system for access control. Fujitsu even envisions that the system could be built into cars as an alternative to existing security systems using keys or RFID tags.

Fingerprint scans have a false acceptance rate (when someone else is mistakenly identified as the authorised user) of around one in 100,000, compared to around one in 1.25 million for palm vein scans, according to Fujitsu. The false rejection rate (where the authorised user is refused access) is around one in 1,000 for fingerprint scans and one in 10,000 for palm vein scans. 

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