Barclays has announced the arrival of personal biometric scanners to keep your Internet banking security firmly under your thumb.
Gone are the days of fumbling with desktop card readers, phone authentication, and PIN codes as a finger scanner will be available to wealthy corporate banking clients from 2015, and the rest of us surely soon after.
The device, developed with Hitachi's Finger Vein Authentication Technology (VeinID), will read the subdermal patterns of the client's finger vasculature in order to combat identity fraud. Vein pattern recognition holds several advantages over fingerprint scanning, including reliability and speed, with the authentication taking only two seconds.