"Alexander Holding" and smart card news . . .
I checked the institutional holders of IDX, and "Alexander Holding Corp." has not been listed. Must be a misprint.
However, the second largest institutional holder (excluding Ascom) is Barclays Bank PLC, with about 362,000 shares, or over 1% of the total. There is occasional discussion of Barclays here. . . . The January 31, 1998 The Guardian (London) reports that Barclays has rejected photo cards and is investigating using finger scanning (first option) or signature verification (second option) on smartcards. They have had success over the past two years on fingerscanning biometrics for access internally, and have tested the Fingerscan system specifically, among others not named. (Mytec and Identicator are supposedly present in the UK).
Computer Weekly of September 4, 1997, said that Barclays is looking into fingerscanning at ATMs. In the October 16, 1997, Communications Week, a Barclay official was quoted as saying "Our long term objective is to have biometric information stored on a credit or smartcard. People would rather have their fingerprints stored on a card because they feel they can keep control over them."
I believe this Barclays smartcard implementation, however, is sometime off.
Other smartcard stuff: In South Africa, the government is using fingerprints on smart cards to cut down on pension fraud. It has worked. The card is presented at an ATM along with a fingerprint challenge. (1/31/98 The Guardian). (Is this ours?) Also, Unisys is supplying the Andalucia region in southern Spain with a fingerprint notification system to cut down on social security fraud, according to the July 15, 1997 Financial Times (London). The project, which was due to be complete by the end of 1997, involved 7 million smart cards and 633 fingerprint readers. (Who has that one?) |
