Japanese Credit Card Firm To Trial Palm Biometrics Authentication

JCB will trial an authentication system based on palm biometrics, the Tokyo-based credit card company has announced.

The trial will revolve around biometric technology provided by Universal Robot (UR). UR’s solution is designed to assess both palm print and palm vein patterns, and UR says it offers a false acceptance rate of one in 100 billion, calculated from a 0.0003 percent FAR for palm print and palm vein scanning respectively. Remarkably, while many other palm vein scanning technologies tend to rely on infrared imaging, UR’s system is one of the few that is based on visible light, allowing such imaging through a standard mobile camera.

The trail will see customers’ biometric data captured using a smartphone camera, stored on a server, and used for mobile authentication. According to a statement announcing the project, JCB’s aim is to investigate “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.”

The trial is slated to run next month at JCB’s headquarters in Tokyo, though the firm hasn’t yet offered a more specific timeline for its duration, nor has it indicated when a wider rollout of the technology might be expected. In addition to UR’s provision of biometric technology, the project is also seeing assistance from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.”

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January 5, 2018 – by Alex Perala