Could credit cards be replaced by fingerprints?

January 23, 2007

In New York there is a revolutionary new way to pay for your groceries. No longer are people getting themselves into debt with their credit cards as this new way of paying is much simpler and cheaper to use. So just what is this new way of paying? The answer – fingerprints.

As hard as it is to believe, an upscale grocer has started allowing its customers to pay for their goods through their fingerprints. The fingerprints bring up a kind of digital wallet and from there the customer can pay. It is certainly a novel way of beating identity fraud and it could also help to stop people spending unnecessarily on their credit cards. However, there will no doubt be those people who say it affects their human rights.

The new technology certainly brings things to a whole new level. It is like something that you see in a future based film, but it is in fact real. Another great advantage is that it makes buying your groceries a whole lot quicker too. Many companies lose business simply because they cannot cope with the high demand in peak times. With this new fingerprint system it speeds things up which would allow stores to serve more people.

The question now is, how long will it take to reach the rest of the world? Will the UK be following in New York’s footsteps? Well it all depends upon how successful the new system is.

One thing is for certain, consumers definitely like this new, smart way of paying and with identity theft being virtually impossible because of it, it is eventually set to go down a storm in all parts of the world. Even people from Japan are travelling to New York for this new novel way of paying and Japan is one of the leading countries for new inventions. So, if you want to see this new payment system in action you too will have to fly to New York.