Bank customers will soon have to confirm their identities by scanning the intricate and unique patterns of blood vessels in their fingers, in a move to crack down on fraud by Barclays.
The bank said that it was adopting “finger vein authentication” technology for large businesses from next year, and that the system could eventually be rolled out for small firms and personal customers.
By inserting their fingers into a special reader, customers would be able to access their online accounts with no need for PINs or passwords.
The new system, designed and manufactured by Hitachi, of Japan, is initially being offered to 30,000 large business customers from next year.
Finger vein recognition technology goes back to 2002 and is used in eight out of ten Japanese cash machines, but is barely known in Britain.
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Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of Barclays’ personal and corporate banking division, said that the technology would be “game-changing for UK businesses and consumers”.
The readers, which use infrared light, are the size of a computer mouse and can be plugged into a personal computer. Barclays said that the technology was better than fingerprint systems, which could be outwitted by sophisticated criminals; for example, a severed finger could not be used by a criminal because blood would have to be passing through the veins.
Hitachi claims that its technology is wrong in approving a falsely matched identity in only one case in a million, and in rejecting a bona fide customer in one case in 10,000. Cifas, the fraud prevention service, said that identity fraud was a growing problem: 123,600 cases were reported in 2012, up from 77,500 in 2007. The annual cost has been put at £3.3 billion by the National Fraud Authority, the now-defunct government agency.
At present, officials in big companies using Barclays employ a small device known as PINsentry, into which they key a four-digit PIN, which then generates a code for them to gain access to the account.
Barclays said that security was sometimes compromised because officials in the accounts departments of their corporate customers occasionally shared the same PIN and even wrote it down on the bottom of the device.
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Corporate customers will initially have to pay for the new devices, which will cost less than £100.
Apple has also incorporated fingerprint authentication technology for the iPhone 5, which was released in 2012.