Shoppers at a French supermarket will be able to pay at the checkout with just a swipe of their hand from next week.
New biometric technology, which is being rolled out at a Carrefour store in Paris, will scan the pattern of veins underneath the skin of customers’ hands and match their ID with their bank account.
The scheme is spearheaded by Mastercard and it is the first of its kind in Europe.
Britons travelling to Paris for the Olympics will be able to try out the cashless technology from Monday. Customers who link their palm biometrics to a bank card in-store will then be ready to pay via their hand for all future purchases.
To do so, they place their palm over a near-infrared sensor at the checkout counter. It reads the vein patterns beneath the skin and matches the ID with logged bank details to process the payment.
It is hoped the process will result in faster transaction times, greater hygiene and improved security.
Mastercard, which is working with tech firm Ingenico to deliver the scheme, rolled out a similar trial in Uruguay last month. Ingenico’s website states that “palm vein patterns are highly intricate and unique to each individual, making this method extremely secure”.
Carrefour, which is the second largest supermarket chain in France, was approached for comment.
Its store trialling the system is on the Left Bank of Paris, in the sixth arrondissement near the île de la Cité.
The vein-reading scheme’s introduction to Europe comes three years after Amazon launched similar software in its Whole Foods Market stores in the US.
Mastercard also introduced face recognition payments in some Polish shops last month, while retailers in China have been using smile recognition scanners for a number of years.
With biometrics now having landed in neighbouring France, it could be only a matter of time until futuristic tech appears at British checkouts. Julian Hayes, a data protection expert at BCL Solicitors, said there was an appetite among big British retailers for biometric technology.
He said: “Supermarkets and high-street stores are keen on facial recognition technology as a means of tackling the growing scourge of shoplifting, denting their profit margins and risking the safety of their staff.
“Privacy campaigners and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are more sceptical, highlighting the risks of misidentification and potential for damage to public trust.”
In 2020, the Dutch data protection watchdog stated that introducing facial recognition technology into supermarkets would be a breach of the country’s privacy laws. But there has been no such warning in Britain, and the Home Office has this year consulted on changes allowing supermarkets to use software that estimates if a buyer is over 18.
Mr Hayes said: “The last government was gung-ho for hi-tech law enforcement, ear-marking more than £4m for the roll-out of roving police biometric units over the next four years.
“Labour seems unlikely to strike out on a different tack. Maintenance of law and order and the potential for cost-savings are likely to push the new administration towards the encouragement of biometrics of all kinds in the fight against crime.”
Biometric software is already commonly used in banking and at airports. Come October, fingerprint systems are due to be implemented at the Port of Dover and Eurostar terminals.
Last week’s global outage sparked by an issue with CrowdStrike has raised the debate over the world’s reliance on tech systems amid fears cash will be entirely fazed out.
There were 21.6 million consumers who used cash only once a month or not at all in 2022, but less than one million who “mainly” used cash, according to industry body UK Finance.
In 2017, more than two million consumers had used cash as their main payment mechanism. Globally, cash use declined by four percentage points in 2022, according to a McKinsey report.
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