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Biometric Banking

Mexican bank brings ATM access to masses using fingerprint readers

By Katherine Walsh

March 01, 2007 — CSO —

A PIN and a fingerprint: For customers of Banco Azteca, the Latin American bank based in Mexico City, it's all they need to conduct a transaction.

That's good news, considering that many of the bank's customers haven't completed elementary school and don't know how to read. But despite the fact that 75 percent of the bank's 8 million customers can't sign their name, they have been able to open savings and credit accounts for the first time, says Marco Velásquez, director of e-banking for Banco Azteca.

Banco Azteca is using fingerprint-reading biometric authentication sensors from DigitalPersona in what the players say is one of the largest biometric banking implementations. The bank is using the sensors at its banks, Elektra stores and corporate facilities.

Here's how it works: When someone initially opens a debit or credit account at a Banco Azteca branch, his identity is verified through personal information and an official ID, such as a license. An image of the left and right index fingerprint is captured, encrypted, converted to a template and stored, along with the personal information and picture of the user, in a large database. The PIN, picture and fingerprint are verified each time the customer makes a transaction. Customers can also use a Banco Azteca card—a smart card with a microchip that stores the user's picture and fingerprint—to make purchases at stores affiliated with Banco Azteca. "The fingerprint with the BA Card replaces the signature or the PIN that we use with credit cards or ATM cards in North America and Europe," says Chip Mesec, senior product marketing manager for DigitalPersona.

Paul Collier, executive director of the nonprofit Biometric Foundation, says the smart card with biometric function has found a comfortable place in foreign markets. Collier says it takes three elements for such an application to become mainstream: user acceptance, low-cost sensors and ease of integration with existing systems. The security of fingerprint images converted to binary code makes it relatively secure, Collier says: "It is extremely difficult to reconstruct that fingerprint image from that template; it is impossible to ever perfectly recreate it."

In a country like Mexico, where fingerprints are used for voter registration, biometric smart cards are readily accepted by consumers.

Fingerprints are the most widely used biometrics, in part, because the readers are smaller than those used for biometrics such as iris and facial scans, and they cost less, says DigitalPersona's Mesec. Fingerprint sensors cost about $100 each, but Mesec says that his company sometimes negotiates bulk rates.