Blood money: PulseWallet lets you pay with your veins

“Spread your fingers.”

“Capturing…”

“Remove your hand.”

Just like that, a machine called PulseWallet scanned the veins in my right hand and charged my credit card.

PulseWallet, or palm scanners like it, might soon call your local Starbucks home and provide one more way to pay for your Pumpkin Spice Latte.

PulseWallet is a credit card terminal and register with a built-in biometric palm reader. Inside the reader is an infrared Fujitsu camera that photographs your vein pattern and then pairs it with the credit card you’ve swiped. Once you’ve paired you can hold your hand over any PulseWallet terminal to pay with your credit card. If you’re a business owner, you can hook it up to your POS (point of sale) cash register, or to PulseWallet’s bundled register, which includes a Windows tablet. The whole package is being announced today, and goes on sale next month for a yet-unspecified price.

PulseWallet may not command the hype of immaculately designed Silicon Valley payments startups like Coin or Square, flush with cash and top engineering talent, but it works. It was non-invasive and able to identify you in less than a second in my tests. In the age of Touch ID, PulseWallet’s hands-off approach is refreshing, but is it anything more than a pipe dream in a world where any attempt to create a new payments system runs into gigantic roadblocks?

PulseWallet CTO Matt Saricicek remembers watching Google debut its Wallet mobile payments product and being pretty disappointed. “Why should you have to present anything to make a payment — and to prove your identity — other than yourself?” he wondered. Saricicek looked at the iPad POS systems he was building for San Francisco company Revel Systems and decided he didn’t love those either. He booked a flight home to New Jersey and pitched an idea to high school pal Aimann Rasheed: what if you could pay with your finger?

Several months later at CES 2012, the duo debuted a payments system built on Hitachi’s VeinID technology, which takes an infrared photo of the veins in one of your fingers. But nobody wanted to put their hands in the machine, and VeinID wasn’t as accurate as Saricicek and Rasheed had hoped. So they dreamt bigger. The duo looked next to Fujitsu, whose PalmSecure technology operated on similar principles but scanned your palm instead of your finger. The infrared image generated by PalmSecure was converted into a biometric template, which was then stored in the cloud. When you place your hand over another PalmSecure reader operated by the same owner (like a bank, hospital, or school), the device looks for a perfect match in its database, and if it finds one, your identity is verified. After age eight, Saricicek says, most peoples’ veins stay largely the same, so you won’t have to worry about rescanning your hand. The technology is correct about 99.99992 percent of the time,Fujitsu says, and since PulseWallet requires you to enter your phone number as a second degree of authentication, it hopes to raise that percentage to 100. TRUNews