Josephson told ZDNet Australia the bubble for biometrics in ATMs had occurred several years ago, with many banks expressing interest in the technology. However, when NCR - which supplies 80 percent of Australia's ATMs - developed the technology to integrate biometrics into its machines it found the banks to be less enthusiastic.
-We've got the technology ready but we don't see a big customer demand," said Josephson. -We've done the work to integrate [fingerprinting and retinal scans] into the machines."
According to Josephson the problem with biometrics is deploying the machines across the network, and the interoperability of ATM cards with the machines of different banks. -If a bank rolls out a thousand ATMs that recognise retina, can consumers use another banks ATM? There are a lot of inter-bank networks, the really tricky stuff happens in the networks behind the ATMs."
-Bluetooth and mobile capabilities will probably come in before biometrics," said Josephson. NCR are now pushing the ability for consumers to connect to ATMs using their mobile phones, or with PDA's or notebooks via Bluetooth. This would allow consumers to -dial-in" to the ATM and complete the transaction before they arrived. At the ATM they'd just have to connect and provide proof of identity, through a password typed on the phone for example, and their transaction would be completed.
He agreed that under this scenario, if biometrics was going to become involved in automatic banking it would probably be through currently-available attachments to notebooks and PDA's.
