Palm-vein technology

Fraud Cost The Banks Billions Last Year

Fujitsu offers a helping hand.

Your palm is illuminated by infra-red light that makes the veins just under your skin emit a black refelction. Using a proprietary Fujitsu algorithm, a pattern is extracted of this picture of your veins and is checked against patterns stored in the system, or on your card.

An epidemic of money laundering, fraud and identity theft is sweeping the world. As financial transactions become increasingly electronic, fraudsters find new ways to dishonestly divert funds, taking the banks and their customers for at least £1 billion every month.

And these are no amateur hackers. Some estimate that organised crime spends more on subverting the world’s financial security systems than the banks spend putting them in place.

There is, however, new hope in the race to stay ahead of the game. Indeed, our own bodies may hold the key to keeping hold of our cash. In Japan and Spain some ATM machines will soon use Fujitsu technology to read the pattern of blood vessels in each customer’s palm to verify identity.

More complex than fingerprints and unique to each one of us, palm vein patterns never change throughout life and are hard to fake or copy as they lie under the skin.

Also, palm vein patterns are read without contact, solving the hygiene concerns many people have about fingerprints.

Phishing And One Way to Phix it

But what about when you’re transacting online or sending and receiving emails? You can’t show your palm to a reader in these situations, so how can you be sure the people and organisations you’re in touch with are who they say they are? It’s very difficult, as many banks are discovering.

Remember the fake emails that some Lloyds, Barclays, Natwest and Halifax customers received last autumn? That was "phishing": sending emails that purport to be from your bank, asking you to visit a fake website to confirm your account access details.

If you fall for it (and some estimates say 20% do), your money is at the mercy of the phishermen.

What’s needed is a way to be absolutely certain:

• who sent an electronic communication
• it wasn’t tampered with on the way
• the record of who sent it and received it and when it was sent and received, cannot be tampered with

Fujitsu has recently introduced a service that provides this certainty. With no need for major technology investment, banks can communicate with their customers securely guaranteeing integrity of information content The service is based on technology called Secure Electronic Messaging (SEM).

And it’s not just banks and their customers who can use the SEM service. SEM is applicable in any situation where documents or information need to be shared securely and confidentially, and where an auditable record of communications is required.

For example, the service is ideally suited for the legal profession for the exchange of contracts and other documents. SEM is already being used in the Australian healthcare industry, and in electronic postal services in Canada and Sweden.

For more information, you can contact Fujitsu on 0870 242 7998 or email askfujitsu@uk.fujitsu.com