This excerpt is taken from a story posted on the Mytec thread:
"'We've not yet found a viable business application for biometrics,' says Laleh Mahjour, manager of the emerging technology group at Royal Bank of Canada.
"MasterCard International doesn't share that view. In an attempt to reduce fraud, the credit card issuer is set to expand its three-year fingerprint trial at its Purchase, N.Y., headquarters early next year, says Joel Lisker, senior vice-president of security and risk management and a former fingerprint expert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"The company will move to an expanded employee ID program that will encode a worker's fingerprint onto a tiny chip embedded in a corporate credit card, which will also serve as their identity pass.
"'This phase will allow us to test actual point-of-sale type as we move to larger merchant trials,' Mr. Lisker says.
"A year later, the trial is to move to Europe, where biometrics use
is more accepted.
"Mr. Lisker estimates the use of biometrics could slash credit card
fraud by 90 per cent. Such fraud costs issuers $2-billion a year.
"That means MasterCard could recoup in three years the $1.5-billion it would cost to equip its 50 million merchants with finger scanners, he says."
I have a hard time making sense of that sentence I italicized -- the arithmetic comes out to $30 per finger scanner. Even in a few years, I don't think you can count on the price dropping quite that far, but maybe if IDX is selling 50 million units to Mastercard they could give them a good price . . . Everyone remembers, of course, that Mastercard is working with Identicator. |
