Today brings the announcement that a biometric physical payment solution has gone live in Vietnam, allowing customers to pay for goods with nothing but their identity. No cards, no PINs, not even a smartphone is needed, just prior registration and the tip of a finger.
TSYS is responsible for the PRIME ATM technology that powers this solution, which has been selected by Vietnam Export Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Vietnam Eximbank) to provide over the counter payment or ATM transactions to its customers via fingerprint authentication.
Mitsuaki Shiogo, vice president of Eximbank commented: “Ease of payments is central to the Eximbank vision of financial inclusion and the implementation of transaction identification and authentication with the support of TSYS and Fingerprint Technology is key to achieving this objective.”
Vietnam Eximbank is optimistic with this deployment – one of the first in the country – and plans to extend it to point-of-sale networks. The big, ambitious idea is to make fingerprints the de facto payment method.
“Eximbank’s initiatives in launching card-not-present, fingerprint authenticated transactions, demonstrate that it is a leading innovator of advanced banking technologies in the Asia Pacific region,” said Amit Sethi, managing director of Asia, Middle East and Africa, TSYS International. “We are delighted to be working closely with the bank and supporting its financial inclusion strategy, sharing the extensive strengths of our licensed PRIME solution combined with our expertise as a leading global payment solutions provider.”
Biometric payment solutions like this are an interesting prospect. Despite the growing interest in mCommerce solutions enabled by smartphone technology, these POS style “naked payments” that only require the submission of a body part do make a good case for themselves.
The Fujitsu powered Pulse Wallet, for instance, uses palm vein technology to authenticate users, allowing them access to their associated digital wallets to make payments. Not only do these solutions help provide banking services to customers regardless of language barriers or literacy challenges, but they are also playing the environmental card, with PulseWallet specifically posturing itself as a green payment method since it requires zero waste (cards or receipts) other than the manufacturing resources of the terminals themselves.
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