While iris and fingerprint biometric security technologies have proven to be effective, Gesa Credit Union of Richland, Wash., is quite literally asking members for a hand to help improve security even more with its palm-vein biometric reader pilot program.
"We have been working on our omni-channel and branch technology for the last couple of years," said Gesa CU's CIO Raj Bandaru. "As part of that effort, we wanted to enhance the security when a member walks up to the teller line, and to eliminate member fraud."
The $1.7 billion Gesa CU, which supports 18 member service centers and 135,000 members, recently rolled out the Verifast Palm Authentication pilot program to four geographically and demographically disparate locations. From December 2015 to February 2016, 256 members were enrolled. To date, the effort has reduced the time it takes to authenticate a member in the branch setting by 93%.
"During the beta test period, the solution reduced the time it takes to authenticate from over 15 seconds to one second," explained Gesa CU's Director of Products Karl Guynn.
A More Secure Biometric?
Last year, Fiserv, which provides its DNA core platform for Gesa CU, developed a relationship with Fujitsu. The latter company had recently completed biometric testing and determined that palm-vein scanning was more secure than iris or fingerprint scans.
Like Iris and fingerprint, the palm-vein scan uses infrared technology, but reads the blood flowing under a person's skin, explained Fiserv Director Product Management for Open Solutions Dave Reim.
"With your palm, there are five million reference points and the scan takes a digital picture and stores it in a secure data base," said Reim. "If you compare that to the next strongest biometric, which is iris, it only has 1.5 million reference points. After 12 years old, nothing physically changes in your palm, so once an image is captured, it is usually good for life."
Members only have to scan one palm, a process that takes no more than 30 seconds. The countertop scanning device is connected to a tablet that faces the member. The authentication is fed to the teller's secure monitor.
With regard to implementation, Guynn explained that tellers require 20 to 30 minutes of training. The software and hardware components were easily streamlined, however, a separate secure, fully encrypted data base for image storage had to be integrated with the CU's core.
Reim and his team conducted further research and discovered that palm-vein readers have been on the market for 12 years and widely used in South America, Asia and Europe. Financial institutions in these regions have also incorporated the reader into ATMs. In Brazil, for example, more than 40,000 ATMs deploy this technology.
Excited by the prospect of palm-vein reading technologies, Reim excitedly approached Gesa CU late last year, and the pilot program was born.
"Gesa CU is our first beta client, but we now have other credit union clients in pilot programs," said Reim. "Ideally, we want to take this technology to the ITM and/or the ATM."
High Five
To better understand member feedback to the pilot program, which the CU calls Gesa Xpress, a seven-question form was provided to participating members. The solution was rated from one to five.
"Everyone loves the technology, and they have asked for it at other locations, but there have been a couple of questions about what we would do with the information and if the data base was secure," said Guynn. "But 99% of the responses were positive."
Currently, each pilot branch has one scanning device and tablet. But Gesa CU plans on rolling out the technology to four more locations later this year. And as adoption rates increase, Guynn said each branch will soon have multiple devices. Though it's still early in the process, Bandaru said the goal is to have half of all branch traffic enrolled in Gesa Xpress by 2017.
"As we deploy branch transformations, our long-term vision is for our universal employees to be mobile with the scanner and iPad and authenticate members and perform all teller functions," said Bandaru. "We feel this technology will get us there."
