If you're in the banking business, 1999 is all about Y2K preparation. But once that crisis passes, it's on to bigger and better things.
Once 2000 rolls around, financial institutions worldwide will start ramping up services with high-tech kiosks that employ fingerprint scanners, voice-recognition systems, and other biometric identification systems.
Janet Harris, CEO of Riverside Health System Employees Credit Union in Newport News, Virginia, is what you would call an early adopter. Harris said her credit union was one of the first financial institutions in the country to set up a banking kiosk with a biometric fingerprint scanner.
Supplied by Real Time Data Management Services, a Norfolk, Virginia-based software company and Internet service provider, the kiosk handles loan applications, fund transfers, and other such mundane banking transactions.
"It is absolutely radical, and people love it," Harris said. "The 50-year-olds like it because they think it's a really secure form of identity checking, and 20-year-olds like it because no one else has it."
Biometric identification -- which uses biological traits such as fingerprints, retinal patterns, or voice matching -- has been around for years, but only recently has it become cheap enough and reliable enough for commercial use. Harris said that the total cost of the machine they bought was US$12,000. "So many people think it's out of their price range, but we're only a $4.2 million credit union," she added.
Rick Scali, vice president of marketing at Real Time Data, said that a fully equipped biometric kiosk costs about $30,000, which is on par with traditional ATMs. Real Time Data develops the software that handles the fingerprint verification, and he estimates that there are about 1,000 biometric kiosks at financial institutions in the United States. About half of those, he said, conduct tangible transactions, like cash dispensing.
