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Mobile Payments World (UK), “Atrua partners for interoperable mobile biometrics”

March 22 2007

By Alex Rolfe

Atrua Technologies have announced a co-operation for developing interoperable, standards-based, biometric SIM-card capabilities with Swisscom Mobile. This capability opens the door to broad deployment of mobile data services such as ticketing, banking, payments and other transactions utilizing fingerprint recognition to improve security and usability.

Increasing deployment of advanced mobile applications and services such as m-commerce and rising market penetration of smart phones that store valuable business and personal information are driving the need for better security and stronger authentication capabilities. To address the need for strong and convenient authentication, handsets with advanced fingerprint recognition sensors that support these open standards are now entering the European market.

Utilizing proven, existing, open standards for representing fingerprints in a format known as 'minutiae template', the companies have developed an interoperable approach for allowing fingerprint sensors to interact with SIMs, paving the way for mass market deployment of biometric capabilities on mobile phones.

Using the SIM as the vehicle for storing biometric information provides users with convenience and privacy, since the user's biometric information is stored securely on the SIM card, which can be transferred from one fingerprint handset to another.

“We are excited about the potential for fingerprint mobile devices and their ability to support innovative new secure and personalized services for our customers,” comments Olaf Schulze, head of external PR, Swisscom Mobile. “The standards-based approach is vital to providing the flexibility and efficiency needed by Swisscom, other network operators, and handset makers, by ensuring that the fingerprint sensor, SIM, and applications are all compatible.”

Since this announcement, Toshiba's latest series of 3G Windows mobile phones, bound for European markets, include Atrua's fingerprint touch control solution. “Customers are demanding fingerprint touch controls in Windows Mobile phones due to the critical information they contain,” says Kosei Okamoto, chief technology executive, Toshiba Corporation. “Atrua's solution is one of the best on the market, enhancing the security and usability of our mobile phones while being easy to integrate due to its good design, with benefits like low power consumption, small board area and limited CPU requirements.”