The public won't be magically summoning cash from an ATM with a wave of the hand anytime soon. At least one industry watcher is saying that gesture technology is nowhere near viability as an ATM authentication solution.
Caroline Lewis Pereira, technical insights director for ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan, recently told ZDNet that technology involving ID via physical gestures is still in a nascent stage.
FIs would have to make a huge investment in high quality cameras and sensors to deploy the technology. She said these costs would pose a huge obstacle to adoption of gestural authentication. She told ZDNet that consumers might also resist the technology, since they were used to keeping their physical behavior at ATMs — for instance, PIN entry — very private.
Heidi Shey, security and risk researcher at Forrester Research, confirmed that there were barriers to adoption with gesture-based security. "Technology needs to help, not hinder, customer interactions," she said. "Unless there is a really compelling reason for banks to invest in [gesture technology], such as regulatory requirement or a carefully calculated marketing and branding effort, [it] won't be a priority."
Even if gesture-based services were deployed, Shey said they probably would supplement, rather than replace, more mature biometric technologies such as facial or voice recognition and fingerprint or palm scanning.
For more on this topic, visit the security research center.
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