Fingerprint biometrics strong in financial markets

New research from Frost & Sullivan says that the fingerprint isn't likely to be knocked off its pedestal in the financial markets anytime soon.

The fingerprint has been adopted in financial markets as the biometric of choice. According to the researchers, it's not entirely uncommon to find fingerprint biometrics used for both logical/network access control and physical/building access control. Increasingly, the fingerprint is also being used to authenticate financial transactions, especially at ATMs and financial kiosks in the Asia-Pacific market.

Fingerprint biometrics' "advantages of high accuracy, low hardware costs, and wide applicability to different financial applications will drive its dominance," wrote Frost & Sullivan researchers in a summary promoting the report. "In the long term, major growth is expected to come from developing regions such as Asia Pacific and Latin America, where the stringent privacy laws and negative impressions of fingerprinting do not restraint adoption."

And while the fingerprint isn't going away (it's anticipated to expand in this market), the researchers said they also found increasing use of iris recognition for physical access control at a few high-end private banks in Switzerland.