Thanks to French technology, you will soon no longer need to use your bank card or your smartphone to pay at the checkout: the palm of your hand will be enough!
Since Covid and the resulting panic of touching a contaminated surface, we have gotten into the habit of paying contactless, whether with our bank card or with our smartphone. And it is clear that this saves considerable time and reduces long queues at the checkout. But we’re always looking for lighter, faster and more secure ways to pay for our purchases. And the most promising avenue seems to be nothing more and nothing less than the palm of our hand. It would be practical: no risk of losing it or forgetting it, a few seconds would be enough to pay the amount of our purchases. We could pay at any time without having to take anything with us!
This scenario which, just a few years ago, seemed straight from a science fiction book, could soon become reality in our green lands thanks to the French company Ingenico, an important player in the payment terminal sector – it is now the source of one in three payment terminals in the world. Indeed, it aims to use biometric data from hand veins to facilitate the in-store payment process. Concretely, all we have to do is position our hand ten centimeters from a payment terminal equipped with a scanner to pay for our purchases. Magic !
This technology is based on palm recognition. The principle is simple. A machine scans the hand using an infrared sensor, analyzing its blood flow to establish its venous pattern. It then associates this unique pattern – it is specific to each person, like fingerprints – with a bank card, in the form of a series of numbers. A process described as the most secure, since the palm of the hand would be the most secure element from a biometric point of view, ahead of the iris or the fingerprint.
This innovation should not arrive immediately in France, since Ingenico must first test it in South America in the coming months, where the owner of a large supermarket chain has agreed to try it. The company hopes to introduce this payment method as quickly as possible in France and to be able to begin tests in supermarkets at the end of 2024. Note that Amazon offers the same type of service with Amazon One, an application which allows consumers Americans to register directly through their smartphone to pay for their purchases with a simple movement of their hand in its stores. But here again, France is not concerned.