Banks are the top spenders when it comes to identity management solutions, forking out up to $1 billion annually according to IDC.
The analyst firm predicts that by 2021, 50% of online transactions will use biometric authentication, and by 2018, 70% of enterprise cybersecurity environments will use cognitive/AI technologies to assist humans in dealing with the vastly increasing scale and complexity of cyber threats.
It is not surprising therefore that financial institutions like JCB in Japan are trialing multipurpose server-based biometric authentication technologies to support future business. One such trial involves the use of visible light palm authentication, a collaborative effort with Universal Robot (UR), and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
The trial will use UR's visible light palm authentication, using both palm print and vein patterns. The trial will focus on testing technical aspects during the registration and payment flow: capturing customer palm print and vein patterns with a smartphone camera, storing the patterns on a server, performing authentication, and returning the results to the smartphone.
JCB will study how to utilize the authentication technology for a wide variety of services while only requiring the customer to register their palm information in the authentication server once using their own smartphone.
In contrast to the palm vein technology using near-infrared light currently in general use, Universal Robot has made it possible to capture vein patterns with visible light for authentication purposes. This means that authentication can be done with just a smartphone camera with a 0.0003% possibility of misidentification, according to UR.
The visible light palm authentication used in this trial combines palm vein pattern authentication with palm print search of the data base to find the person's information. This technology boasts the world's highest level of accuracy due to the combination of palm vein pattern and palm print identification.
First published in Fintech Innovation