Biometric Security - a Body, a Password

Nowadays most companies use only credit card and numbered accounts in order to pay their employees and cash payments are growing rarer by the day. One problem that arises from this approach is the identity theft or the loss of valuable information like PIN numbers and so on.

A number of hardware companies tried, with little success so far, to address this issue by using biometric scans. This approach is totally different from classical security ones as each person's body is both the "user name" and the "password" needed to access some sort of restricted information like a bank deposit for example.

Another duo of Japanese firms are working now on what is hoped to be a more secure way of depositing and withdrawing money from a bank. Hitachi and JCB are working on a joint enterprise, trying to design and manufacture a foolproof system to "identify the veins on a person's finger" in order for that person to gain access to a bank account or an ATM machine. According to Hitachi, the system is the ultimate in personal account security. Just as expected more and more banking companies are looking for better and more secure ways to identify account holders and the producing firms, Hitachi and JCB, are using this trend to push forward their biometric security system.

In an attempt to gain bankers' trust in its biometric payment system, "Hitachi said it would launch an experiment in September involving 200 of its employees to see if it is commercially viable to introduce the system in shops, banks and other businesses," according to the news Web based site Forbes and "in Hitachi's new system, a customer would simply hold his or her finger in front of a machine which, without making contact, would scan an image that would be matched up with customers' data in the system". Not only JCB and Hitachi are interested in this new way of securing information however and they might face the opposition of the manufacturers that built and installed similar biometric security systems for the Japanese banking giants Mitsubishi and Sumitomo Mitsui.