BAY HARBOR, FL /Marketwired/ -- Speaking from the companies offices in Bay Harbor, SmartMetric Inc. President and CEO Chaya Hendrick said credit card industry figures show card fraud costs the U.S. card payments industry an estimated $8.6 billion per year. Fraud comprises 0.4% of the $2.1 trillion in total yearly U.S. card volume.
Using a person's fingerprint to activate the Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) standard ATM or credit card will protect both financial institutions and cardholders against significant fraud.
SmartMetric has developed a fingerprint reader that sits inside a person's ATM or credit card. It is self powered, allowing it to perform a fingerprint match while a person is standing at a retail checkout or on the street at an ATM. A person simply swipes their finger across the SmartMetric sensor on the surface of the card, and the card's internal computer processor performs a match with the person's fingerprint that is stored in the memory of the card itself. For added security, a person's fingerprint is always stored and encrypted inside the card and is not stored on a bank's computer. When a match occurs, the card's EMV-surface-mounted chip is then turned on, allowing a transaction at the millions of ATM and retail card machines around the world.
Banks don't have to retrofit existing retail ATM's or POS retail card readers to make them "biometric" compatible because the SmartMetric system is built around the banking industry standard EMV system.
It works using the industry standard EMV chip on the surface of the card so that the SmartMetric biometric activated card is compatible for use throughout the payments industry worldwide. EMV is an acronym for Europay Mastercard Visa and has been adopted and is in use in most major markets around the world. It is now being actively deployed in the USA with all of the major card companies and their partner banks having already issued millions of these EMV "chip" cards nationally.
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For further information on SmartMetric and its technology please visit the company's Web site SmartMetric Inc. Information on the SmartMetric MedicalKeyring is available online.
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