What’s the one thing that you never leave home without? Many payments companies will tell you that it’s not your keys or wallet but your mobile phone. Sthaler reckon that they’re all wrong and the answer is none other than your fingers which is why that’s what they’re using for their new payments system, FingoPay.
The idea isn’t to use fingerprints, you leave far too many of them laying about so they can be easily copied. They eschew traditional face recognition and iris scans as they say that they’re also too easy to fake, so FingoPay have gone for a 3D map of the blood vein pattern in your finger.
You register a finger and associate it with your payment method of choice and then when you want to make a purchase your finger is all you need. Forget contactless payments where all someone needs to do is steal your debit card, your finger isn’t going to work too well unless it’s still attached to you. Plus additional information can be attached to your finger such as age verification for when you want to purchase fags or booze.
Retailers and venues who support the FingoPay payment system will have a pink FingoPay scanner and you just pop your registered finger in to be scanned.
There will doubtless be all sorts of cute applications such as storing loyalty cards, gym memberships and discount codes on your FingoPay registered finger account but the best bit of all is that you literally have nothing to carry around with you. If it catches on and goes mainstream you’ll be able to go to the beach in the day, come straight out of the sea and pay for an Ice Cream, maybe grab a fish and chip supper and then pay for the bus home.
Receipts will be emailed which is the one downside to payments of this type. If you’re out in the bar or (god forbid) casinos start letting you buy chips with your finger, you could quickly lose track of how much you are spending until your finger bounces.
For FingoPay to become an ecommerce norm a whole new breed of laptops and mobile devices would need to come to the market which supported VeinID scanning. That’s not likely to happen any time soon as the latest round of devices have only just got to grips with fingerprint, face and iris scanning. FingoPay looks limited to offline payments in locations willing to invest in the scanners until it becomes mainstream.
One Response
” you could quickly lose track of how much you are spending until your finger bounces.”
– “I’m sorry sir but the company policy is that we have to destroy failed payment mediums before returning them. no exceptions”.