Hover hand to pay

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?

The technology is correct about 99.99992 percent of the time

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.

PalmSecure has been around since 2005, but it hasn’t found a home in many mass-market products aside from a few Fujitsu laptops. The technology has been adopted at scale, however, in countries like Italy and Brazil, where 35,000 ATMs use the technology to prevent fraud. But here in America, PalmSecure hasn’t caught on. Some hospitals use PalmSecure to identify patients, and some schools use it to help kids pay for lunch, but to Saricicek’s knowledge, nobody in America has ever tried it for mobile payments.

PulseWallet’s founders can’t explain why palm scanning hasn’t taken off quite like iris scanning and fingerprint reading in the US — especially considering the accuracy of PalmSecure and its half-second response time. PalmSecure is also less invasive than fingerprint scanning since it doesn’t require you to touch anything (though PulseWallet’s initial sign-up has you rest your hand on the terminal for accuracy). "I don’t want any laser being beamed into my eye, but it doesn’t bother me to put out my hand," says Saricicek. "Your hand is your account."

"I don’t want any laser being beamed into my eye ... Your hand is your account."

Saricicek’s challenge is developing a secure payments implementation of PalmSecure that any business can buy wholesale and drop on its cashiers' counters. This means PulseWallet needed register software to compete with Square and a cloud infrastructure to store user scans. It also needed the flexibility to work as both a reader hooked up to any standard POS, and as a full-fledged register. It’s a tough niche to fill in a world where businesses must generally choose between one POS and another.

The payments space might not be PulseWallet’s final destination. The company imagines a future where instead of using a card to open a hotel room, you simply flash your hand when you check in, then flash it again at your door. Payments is only its first try at popularizing palm-scanning in the US.