Last week, SmartMetric, for the first time in an exhibition, demonstrated its biometric payment card with built in fingerprint reader at the Smart Card Alliance Payments Forum.
“We had a constant stream of some of the largest credit card issuers in the country come by our stand to see first hand the new biometric credit card,” said SmartMetric’s President & CEO, Chaya Hendrick. “What amazed so many was the fact that we had embedded a fully functional fingerprint scanner inside a credit card while conforming to credit card industry standards regarding card size and thickness. It was also recognized that the card is able to be issued by banks without them having to change any of their existing systems since the card operates using existing chip card readers and ATM’s. Another big issue that pleased the banks seeing our card was the fact that SmartMetric can produce currently up to 1 million cards a month with the ability to ramp this up considerably within a relatively short space of time.”
According to a company statement, SmartMetric is now in talks with credit card issuing banks around the world who are looking at issuing the biometric fingerprint protected card to satisfy customer concerns about card fraud while at the same time mitigating their own card fraud losses.
“The other issue other biometric companies had is none had a rechargeable battery making it impossible for the card to be used at ATM’s. We could have released a thick card without a rechargeable battery years ago but we knew for our card to be adopted by banks it needed to conform to global card network standards so we persevered to reduce the electronics of a fingerprint scanner that is so thin it can fit inside a credit card and conform to the payments networks standards.”
