We haven’t even managed to get mobile payments up and running successfully and the furthest we’ve really got with fingerprint technology is being able to unlock our expensive iPhone 5s, but an adventurous student at Lund University in Sweden has decided to leap ahead of the trends by demonstrating how it is possible to pay with your hand. Yes, that’s right, hand.

This vein scanning technology has been implemented across 15 stores and restaurants around the Lund University campus that use the terminals, with 1,600 active users.

Security is a major advantage of the technique, said Fredrik Leifland, the student behind the biometric technology: “Every individual’s vein pattern is completely unique, so there really is no way of committing fraud with this system. You always need your hand scanned for a payment to go through”, he clarifies.

“We had to connect all the players ourselves, which was quite complex: the vein scanning terminals, the banks, the stores and the customers. The next step was finding ways of packaging it into a solution that was user friendly.”

So if a student from Sweden can get all the players like shops, banks and shops on board, then what is holding up MNOs, banks and stores from implementing NFC banking technology more widely across mobile devices?

Perhaps we will skip right past the ‘mobile wallet’ and onto the ‘body purse’?