Identity, Security, Payments, Biometrics, Smart Cards and Authentication News

Biometric financial accounts coming to India

Friday, March 14, 2008

India’s Finance Ministry is working on introducing biometric permanent account number cards for greater security of the accounts, according to The Financial Express.

Security concerns and duplication of the PAN cards have prompted the government to look at biometric to secure the cards. The government is concerned that terrorists can get a PAN card and open bank accounts or get a mobile connection to finance activities.

A tender is expected in the next couple of months and the first cards will be rolled out later this year. At first the cards would just be issues too individual’s applying for new accounts but the biometrics would be deployed for all accounts.

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Vodafone and Visa have announced a partnership to enable consumers to pay for goods and services using their mobile phones.

Available to Vodafone’s 398-million customer base across the globe, the mobile wallet service will feature a Vodafone stored value account – based on the Visa prepaid account – that uses Visa payWave technology to perform mobile contactless transactions at the point of sale.

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The Indian government has started piloting biometric data capture for visa applications as part of its Immigration, Visa, Foreigner’s Registration and Tracking (IVFRT) project, reports The Indian Express.

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In an effort to prevent tampering of its core banking solution platform, the State Bank of India plans to integrate biometric authentication devices, reports The Hindu.

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After the murder of jeweler Manoj Kumar Grandhi visiting from Visakhapatnam by three cab drivers, the police in Bangalore, India are considering asking the various cab companies in the region to begin collecting biometrics from their drivers for background checks, according to a Times of India article.

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A new report on the market for biometric technology in India forecasted a 42.4% compound annual growth rate for the industry in the four year span. TechNavio, a market intelligence reporting company, reviews and forecasts the period of 2010 through 2014 from

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The introduction of biometric multimodal fusion has helped lead to greater accuracy in biometric authentication, but its adoption rate is still overall fairly low, reports ZDNet Asia.

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