Fingerprint Scanning, Pay By Touch Soutions Gets Financing

This sounds like a great idea. Skip the cell phone and just use your fingerprint to pay. I have a couple questions.

From Yahoo News Start-up getting financing for fingerprint technology

A San Francisco start-up, Pay By Touch Solutions, is expected to announce today $130 million in fresh financing for a novel way of paying for groceries and other goods and services: a machine that reads your fingerprint.

The capital raised -- $55 million of it in convertible notes and $75 million in loans -- will help the company build out its finger-reading payment systems at several nationwide retailers, including in California in the first quarter of next year.

Customers sign up once, by registering a checking account or a credit card, and showing government identification such as a driver's license. The Pay by Touch technology records the lines and ridges of their fingerprints, and translates the data into a numerical algorithm that is stored in a secure database.

Is the secure database accessed via an intranet or the Internet?

The customers thereafter never have to carry a wallet or purse back to the store, and can use their finger to pay for goods across the Pay By Touch network, which now includes stores in 10 states.

I hope Och-Ziff Capital, Farallon Capital and PLainfield Asset Management did their intellectual property (IP)homework before they committed that type of money to this.

Their site says "All information is encrypted and stored at secure IBM data centers".

I' ll be interested in seeing how this one turns out.

A fingerprint is machine readable and a universal identifier.