Biometrics still not ready for business

The future according to Hollywood would have us believe that Minority Report style biometric iris-scanning and fingerprint reading technology will become a part of our everyday lives both at home and at work.

And while iris-scanning advertising hoardings that are able to target you with personalised ads as you walk past may actually be technically feasible, the reality of biometrics is still some way off.

David Blunkett may be pushing ahead regardless of privacy and cost concerns with plans for a biometric national ID card to tackle the 'threat' of immigration and terrorism, but the private sector is taking much more considered steps.

Just today the Nationwide building society, seen by many as a pioneer of the use of biometric technology, revealed it has dropped plans for using iris or fingerprint recognition in the foreseeable future.

It wasn't that the technology didn't work, but there just isn't a business case yet that justifies spending such large sums of money on that level of security. The Nationwide trialled an iris-scanning cash machine at its Swindon headquarters instead of using bank cards to withdraw money, but the cost was an additional 25 per cent on a normal ATM. And with Pin numbers and cards currently working just fine for most people, that kind of outlay cannot be justified in the competitive world of financial services.

Nationwide also sidelined plans for fingerprint technology after very tentative test lab trials but it is proceeding with a biometric electronic signature project for authorising transactions at counters. The benefits of electronic authentication here over the less than secure and easily forged paper signature are obvious when it comes to tackling fraud and reassuring customers.

The lesson here is that the technology industry needs to be careful it does not fatally damage the future of genuinely useful technologies like biometrics by pushing for its use where there isn't a rock-solid business case.

Repeated hype and high-profile failures could put companies off the technology for good. Just look at what happened to public key infrastructure, which is the perfect example of a good technology looking for a solution to fix rather than the other way around. And this week that industry was dealt a blow with the demise of the once FTSE100 darling and technology star Baltimore Technologies.

So it is sad that Nationwide had dropped iris and fingerprint recognition plans for now, but slow and steady is the way forward.