Wells Fargo is readying to implement a security system whereby its corporate clients can access their bank accounts using either an eye scan or a face and voice recognition system. The bank already has an app for its commercial banking clients. The bank sees this as its contribution to the efforts to do away with passwords, PINs and other information that can be stolen or forgotten, and replace them with biometrics. The system the bank will introduce soon uses a smartphone’s front-facing camera to look at the pattern of blood vessels in the whites of the eyes, a pattern that does not change and is unique like a fingerprint. Initially conceived by a University of Missouri professor as a military tool, the system was developed by EyeVerify, a Kansas City start-up that Wells Fargo invested in two years ago. Its Eyeprint ID system is already used by a few smaller financial institutions, including a Utah credit union and a subsidiary of Toronto’s Scotiabank. To sign in, a customer opens the app and selects the eye-scan option, then lines up the phone’s camera so the eyes are centered in a box on the screen. The customer is then directed to look to the side, exposing the blood vessels on one side of the eye. The whole process takes just a few seconds. To use the bank’s alternative face- and voice-recognition system, developed by two other firms, customers line up their face in a box on their phone’s screen, then read a series of numbers that pops up on the screen.
