Money from your finger

Looking at elderly Germans leisurely picking Frankfurt sausages into a basket, it is hard to believe that a technological revolution is taking place in the supermarket of the village of Grossen-Buzek, half an hour from Frankfurt am Main. The sight of imposing frau, devastating the grocery rows before the weekend, will make anyone ridicule the opinion of experts who believe that this revolution is destined to become global. But the revolution is being made - at the exit from the hall, where the sign "We can pay with a fingerprint" hangs.

This supermarket is testing the digiPROOF payment system. By holding your finger to the reader, you can already pay in 130 German stores, and in some of them the new payment method accounts for up to a quarter of all purchases: Germany is the European leader in the implementation of biometric systems. “This year has been the year of biometrics. The market has finally seen that its widespread adoption will really affect consumers,” said Walter Hamilton, chairman of the Biometrics Industry International Association. According to various estimates, the market for such devices will reach from $7 billion to $12 billion in the next five years.

"Store biometrics", according to experts, has a special role: either "fingers" will enhance the security of bank cards, or "fingers" will replace them altogether. This could happen if fingerprints - as a payment method - pay off the big credit of distrust in the old payment systems.

Paying with your finger is easy: the sensors instantly read the papillary pattern and compare it with their database. If there are more than 70 matches, then identification is considered successful and the computer links the purchase to the bank account of the owner of the pattern. Computer fraud, which became the scourge of the old system of plastic cards, is impossible in this case: the computer does not store the print itself, but its abstract formula, from which you can no longer restore the desired pattern in reverse order. The error is also almost unrealistic: the probability of incorrect identification is one in ten million, the developers say. The system is programmed to answer “yes” and “no”, and in case of doubt, it issues a negative conclusion.

Ulrich Kipper, developer of digiPROOF and head of IT-Werke, a small firm, promises to compensate any victim of finger scams, but in exchange for full evidence of fraud. On the day that a Newsweek reporter was strolling through a store in Grossen-Buzek, Kipper was given them by the first German TV channel. The journalists demonstrated an experiment: the craftsmen transferred the fingerprints left on the glass onto a film, which they glued on the finger and went shopping. The idea was a success - the car mistook the buyer for someone else. Kipper had to make excuses: they say that there is no biometric control system in the world that guarantees absolute reliability. Much more likely to be a fake signature or theft of a pin code.

But if the system is still far from ideal in terms of safety, then in terms of comfort it has already come close to it. The Newsweek correspondent experienced it first hand. Having chosen appetizing-looking sausages, he asked the consultant how to make a purchase with his finger, and soon found himself in the back room with equipment, where he signed a document that allowed him to enter his personal data into the database - passport information, address and bank account number. Two fingers were required. "Just in case," the clerk said. Clients usually choose thumb and index finger, he says, but there are originals (or rude ones) who prefer to put their middle finger on the scanner. “In fact, in biometrics, there are no requirements to show exactly the index finger. It can be chosen solely for reasons of convenience, since putting, say, your thumb on the scanner is not so comfortable,” explains Igor Lukashov, an expert at Biolink Solutions, which supplies biometric equipment to Russia.

Instead of the promised three minutes, registration took ten, but it was not boring, and for patience they were rewarded with a small bottle of champagne. Returning to the checkout, the correspondent was able to pay for the purchases the second time: along the way it turned out that the finger had to be held until the red light went out. As soon as this happened, the cash register immediately spat out a check. “We kept track of the time,” said supermarket director Steffen Preiss. - Paying with cash takes 30 seconds. When paying with a card - about 20, and with a finger - only 5.

The Newsweek correspondent liked the process so much that his finger somehow paid for a few more beers by itself. This, as Ulrich Kipper says, is a natural consumer impulse. Users of the biometric system, according to him, buy not only more often, but also more: the ease of payment whets the appetite. According to supermarket staff, there have been 500 “repeat buyers” in recent months, and most of them are elderly people, which means they are obviously conservative.

Igor Lukashov believes that the system is generally very convenient for retail chains. “The queues at the checkout are significantly reduced, their throughput is increasing, the quality of service is improving, customer loyalty is increasing,” he lists. In addition, there are opportunities for truly personalized marketing. For example, the American Pay by Touch system offers its users to identify themselves in a biometric information kiosk before visiting the trading floor and receive an individual coupon with discount offers for 10–15 products that a person bought earlier. Such marketing will be the most intelligible: according to research results, up to 70% of purchase decisions are made directly in the trading floors.

German experts say that the pace of development of biometric payment systems is constrained only by prejudice: the collection of fingerprints is associated with crimes (the year before last, police fingerprinting was already 110 years old). Therefore, according to the Union of German Banks, biometric payment systems will become really massive no earlier than 2012.

In Russia, too, there is no other obstacle to the development of the “finger system”, except for an even stronger association of procedure with places not so remote than among the Germans. And so, according to Igor Lukashov, with the advent of the law "On Personal Data" and by-laws to it, the gaps in the legislation have actually been eliminated. “With the introduction of biometric passports and visas, wariness is likely to be replaced by a calm attitude, similar to the process of photographing. Second, intensifying competition will inevitably force chains to look for new ways to reduce costs and new ways to attract customers. It can be assumed that the stores selling electrical engineering and computers will be the first to introduce biometric payments,” he predicts. In one of the largest Russian electronics networks, Technosila, although they have heard about the new system, its implementation has not yet been discussed. “This is a serious update: not only the creation of a database, but also integration into it. I think we won't have such a technology for another 5-10 years,” Nadezhda Senyuk, a representative of the company, said. The former manager of Eldorado, and now an independent expert on the household appliances market, Timofey Surovtsev, argues that if anyone adopts such a system, it is banks, and then not all of them: “Not merchants, of course, they live in the Stone Age. We make an earthen vessel with a hammer, and you are talking about an original and elegant solution.

However, even banks believe that it is premature to introduce "fingers" in Russia. Here, one of the managers of Citibank tells Newsweek, it would be nice to first instill a culture of using ordinary bank cards.

Lukashov recalls that two years ago there was a cold war between supporters of biometric technologies and “card bankers”, and it was the last to inflate it: traditionalists already felt threatened. “Now both sides are smart enough to understand that these technologies do not exclude each other, and in some cases can successfully complement one another. It seems to me that the cards will be modified. For example, they will use a fingerprint instead of a pin code,” the expert says. By the way, Citibank already uses a similar system in Singapore and Hong Kong.

But the creator of the German system, Ulrich Kipper, believes that plastic is the last century. According to him, every time a person uses the card, he reveals his data, and digiPROOF allows you to register data only once and in a reliable database. “Theft will be a thing of the past,” Kipper says. And despite the price of €15,000 - a third more expensive than a conventional card terminal - merchants believe him. True, there is not a single large city in the list of settlements where digiPROOF is used. “Finger” is more willing to pay where everyone knows each other.