The store where you’ve got money at your fingertips
Student supermarket trials technology that allows customers to pay using scans of veins in fingers
A BRITISH supermarket has become the first in the world to let shoppers pay for groceries using the veins in their fingertips.
Customers at the Costcutter store at Brunel University in London can now pay using their unique vein pattern to identify themselves.
The company behind the Fingopay technology, Sthaler, said it is in “serious talks” with other UK supermarkets to adopt hi-tech finger vein scanners at pay points across thousands of stores.
The technology works by using infrared to scan people’s finger veins and then links this unique biometric map to their bank cards. Customers’ bank details are then stored with the payment provider Worldpay, in the same way you can store your card details on websites.
Shoppers simply turn up to the supermarket with nothing on them but their own hands and make payments in just three seconds.
Previous studies have found fingerprint recognition, used widely on mobile phones, is vulnerable to being hacked and can be copied even from finger smears left on phone screens.
But Sthaler claims vein technology is the most secure biometric identification method as it cannot be copied or credit stolen. The company said dozens of students were already using the system and it expected 3,000 to have signed up by November.
Fingerprint payments are already used widely at cashpoints in Poland, Turkey and Japan. Vein scanners are also used as a way of accessing highsecurity UK police buildings and authorising internal trading in at least one major British investment bank.
The firm is also in discussions with nightclubs and gyms about using the technology to verify membership and even Premier League football clubs to check whether people have the right access to VIP hospitality areas.
It requires the person to be alive, meaning in the unlikely event a criminal hacks off someone’s finger, it would not work. Sthaler said it takes just one minute to sign up to the system and, after that, just seconds to scan your finger at the checkout.
Simon Binns, commercial director of Sthaler, told The Daily Telegraph: “There are no known incidences where this security has been breached. The scanner checks you are alive, it checks for a pulse, it checks for haemoglobin. Your vein pattern is secure because it is kept on a database in an encrypted form, as binary numbers.”
Nick Telford-reed, director of technology innovation at Worldpay UK, said: “In our view, finger-vein technology has a number of advantages over fingerprint. This deployment of Fingopay in Costcutter branches demonstrates how consumers increasingly want to see their payment methods secure and simple.”