SmartMetric announced this week that it has received clearance to ship its biometric card with its inbuilt rechargeable hybrid battery.
“We are very excited to have now overcome this last remaining hurdle to bring our advanced biometric fingerprint-activated card to market,” said SmartMetric’s president and CEO Chaya Hendrick.
The SmartMetric biometric credit card comes with an internal rechargeable battery that allows the card to be used in all card usage cases, such as restaurants and ATM’s. Having its own power inside the card allows the SmartMetric biometric card to work prior to the card being inserted into a card reader.
The card user places their finger on the surface of the card, and in less than a second, it reads the users fingerprint and matches with card holders’ fingerprint permanently stored inside the card encrypted memory.
“Only the legitimate card holder is able to turn on the card providing a level of credit card security way beyond existing credit cards,” said Hendrick.
When SmartMetric first started on building its prototype biometric credit card more than a decade ago, the overall thickness of the electronics was four times the thickness of a standard credit card. The company says that the overall thickness and profile of its electronics including the board and its internal battery is now less than one-third the thickness of a standard credit card.
The SmartMetric rechargeable battery inside the biometric credit card allows the card to be used across all standard credit card readers at stores, gas pumps and ATMs. SmartMetric contrasted that with non-powered biometric cards that rely on drawing power from card readers in order to perform a biometric identification function, thereby limiting the cards used and making it unworkable in most restaurants, gas pumps and ATMs.
Situations where the card is taken from the table in a restaurant or swallowed whole by the card reading device, such as at a gas pump or ATM, makes a card that does not have an internal rechargeable battery unworkable, the company said. That is why they have spent so much time and effort in including a rechargeable power source inside our biometric card that also includes a rapid rechargeability each time the card is inserted inside a credit card reader after it has already been turned on by the card holder’s fingerprint.
The latest battery for the SmartMetric biometric card is going through final licensing and approvals for shipment via air from the SmartMetric assembly plant.
The SmartMetric biometric fingerprint recognition technology built inside of the credit and debit card uses embedded biometric technology to positively recognize the cardholder and then only after a positive fingerprint recognition, turn on the card’s EMV contact and contactless payments chip.
Market research has shown that 70% of current credit card users are willing to pay $70 for a biometric-secured credit card. This is a low pricing limit with higher pricing for the card from banks to consumers very possible. The same research showed that nearly 70% of the existing hundreds of millions of credit card users would prefer to use a biometric credit card for the added sense of security that a biometric card brings.
According to an article published by Finder.com, the number of credit card accounts open in the United States is 564,500,000. This is an all-time high for the United States.
The average American owns three credit cards; 83% of Americans own at least one credit card, and 14% of Americans own at least ten credit cards.