The first bank to ask all of its customers to provide fingerprint samples so they can be securely identified could be walking into a PR disaster. Yet as more customers begin to control their accounts via the internet and criminals become more technologically sophisticated, customers may themselves demand more elaborate methods of security. Biometrics is not just an application that applies to the financial community, since it has uses in almost every industry. The new smart gun, which will only fire when it identifies an authorised user's fingerprint, is at least two years away from commercial development. The US government will not allow any prosecutions to go ahead so long as the company spends 2 per cent of its firearms revenue on developing the smart gun.
Many large corporations have divisions that develop different biometric systems.
German electronics group Siemens has a biometric division located in Ireland that is looking into the development of fingerprint recognition. Researchers at Southampton University have even devised a way to analyse the shape of a person's ear to pick them out from a crowd. But the huge potential of biometrics has yet to cause any concern to the traditional security industry. Security and alarm company Williams, which owns both Chubb and Yale locks, does not seem to be too worried. It doesn't have a biometrics business itself, though it does possess the ability to use biometrics to trigger locks.