Risk, returns & timeframes illustration
1 min read
March 28, 2023
by
Belinda Nash

Amazon gives fraudsters vein hope ✋

While announcing plans to palm off an additional 9,000 workers last week, Amazon One also announced they hope to bring home the dough by getting Panera Bread customers in the palm of their hand signing a deal for pay-with-palm. Who else is getting in on the handsy biometric tech?
Risk, returns & timeframes illustration
1 min read
March 28, 2023
by
Belinda Nash

Amazon gives fraudsters vein hope ✋

While announcing plans to palm off an additional 9,000 workers last week, Amazon One also announced they hope to bring home the dough by getting Panera Bread customers in the palm of their hand signing a deal for pay-with-palm. Who else is getting in on the handsy biometric tech?
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Last week after announcing plans to palm off an additional 9,000 workers, Amazon’s (AMZN) Amazon One went palm-to-palm with Panera Bread, shaking hands on a deal with the popular US bakery-café chain. 🤝 Soon Panera’s hungry customers will be able to fast-track ordering and paying for their favourite doughy snack simply by waving their palm while clocking up and redeeming MyPanera rewards - like Unlimited Sip Club coffee and teeeeea - using Amazon One - an all-in-one contactless, biometric identification and pay-by-palm service that now links with loyalty programmes. ✋

Sound a little bit too Minority Report? 👁️ Will Panera’s 66 million regular diners fall in loaf with it and help the company’s 2023 IPO hopes rise? 🍞 And are customers’ hands safe from scammers greedy for a snack? 🪓 

Amazon One-maker AWS Applications vice president Dilip Kumar describes their ‘unique palm signature’ service, which has been operating at some Amazon Go, Whole Foods, Starbucks, stadiums and venues since late 2020, as ‘highly secure’. 🔒 The biometric technology works by using infrared light to scan blood vessels in the hand. It then converts more than 500 million data points into encrypted code to create a person’s unique biometric ID. 

Unlike face scanning software that uses just 80 nodal points for identification - and which Kiwi researchers found can even be 3D printed to successfully bust through facial recognition security - palm-vein mapping is internal only. Systems like Amazon One create a digital impression, meaning the technology’s ‘virtually impossible’ to copy by would-be-fraudsters. 🕵️‍♀️

Now one of the world’s largest banks JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is also hoping to go all-hands into the new payment biometric tech. Last week they announced a pilot for consumers to ‘pay with their palms’, pipped for take off at a Miami Formula 1 race. 🏁 According to Goode Intelligence, pay-by-palm is projected to account for around US$5.8 trillion of transactions by 2026 having 3 billion users - that’s nearly half the world’s population. 

Also keen to get handsy is Apple (AAPL), which this month was granted a patent to use palm-vein data for authentication and unlocking devices. Oh hey sci-fi future, come on in. 👋

Belinda Nash
Finance writer
Linkedin

We’re not financial advisors and Hatch news is for your information only. However dazzling our writing, none of it is a recommendation to invest in any of the companies or funds mentioned. If you want support before making any investment decisions, consider seeking financial advice from a licensed provider. We’ve done our best to ensure all information is current when we pushed ‘publish’ on this article. And of course, with investing, your money isn’t guaranteed to grow and there’s always a risk you might lose money.

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