facial recognition - NEC

American Express’ Biometric Testing Takes Off

April 14, 2015         By: Steven Anderson

These days, the battle of the password might seem like a losing one at best.

We have passwords for just about every website we visit, and the passwords are getting ever more complex. Yet it seems like, despite our best efforts, we still find ourselves attacked on every side.

That’s led some to think of biometrics as the best protection we can get, and American Express is currently testing out one set of biometric tools that should offer security in the mobile payments field.

The Wall Street Journal reports that American Express is working on a breed of facial recognition, a move which should help provide high-end security even as more and more devices move to smaller, even wearable, form factors.

It’s said to be part of a larger effort to take current technologies and adapt them for use with mobile in mind, helping to give consumers a different option from the more standard fare of credit cards and the like.

The American Express group involved in the construction of these tools has been said to have been working with Walmart on the Bluebird reloadable prepaid card, as well as the Serve digital wallet/peer-to-peer system.

American Express was also recently seen providing support for the Apple TouchID system, so American Express has quite a bit of room to talk when it comes to biometric security. Back in March, the team behind the project reportedly had a demonstration version available, but reports suggest that it won’t be ready for launch for a good while to come.

While biometric security has a great potential for serving as the ultimate replacement for the password, there are still some very substantial problems afoot with facial recognition. In some cases, facial recognition can be beaten by the simple expedient of showing a system a picture of the person whose face should unlock the system.

Other methods are available for beating biometric systems, ranging from 3D printing fingerprints to other such methods, but it’s clear there’s been a lot of advancement in the field of late. It’s easy to figure that we’ve come a long way since the issues of facial recognition failures over the last few years, and so American Express’ method is likely to be quite the improvement.

Only time will tell just how well this works out, of course, but it’s a pretty safe bet in the short term that American Express may have a truly powerful system for protecting identities and mobile payment users as well. It’s going to be interesting to see some of those demonstrations for ourselves—CES 2016, anyone?—and see just how far it’s come since those early days.