Biometric Payment System May Replace Credit Cards
Credit Cards may soon become a thing of past as a Y Combinator backed startup 'PayTango' wants to make your fingers act as your credit card. The company is developing a system that will use person's fingerprints and other biometric identification to process payments. The startup has already partnered with a few Universities where the system allows students to use their fingers to uniquely identify themselves and make payments without the physical credit cards. The PayTango is a fresh new startup from Carnegie Mellon University, founded by Umang Patel, Christian Reyes, Brian Groudan and Kelly Lau-Kee who will graduate in the next few months but have already floated their startup.
The PayTango founding team has experience in human-computer interface, interaction and information systems. Their initial prototype was a fingerprint scanner coupled with a credit card reader which they developed with a budget of ~$1700. The team is working hard on bringing the cost of development & product down by iterating their design.
The PayTango system asks the users to scan their index and middle fingers simultaneously and checks whether the database has the user information. If the user is new, the system will ask the user to swipe their credit card and then link the biometric data with their credit card. All the further transactions will be linked with credit card without the user having to swipe the card every time they want to make a transaction. The system is fast enough to scan about a 100 students in just about 4 hours.
The company is figuring out a business model for their project and may consider offering monthly subscription. If the pilot at Carnegie Mellon University is successful, the system will be implemented throughout the University in coming days.
We believe this is an interesting system and as we port our lives from real world to virtual world, carrying credit card looks stupid. The PayTango system is actually solving that problem and we wish the team all the best for their future developments & research.
Via: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/25/paytango/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Fingerprints Instead Of Credit Cards? YC-Backed PayTango Aims To Make Payments Work Through Biometrics • TechCrunch</a>
