Even if a person had his or her finger chopped off, it cannot be used for payment, ensures Simon Binns.

“Fingopay only recognizes a living finger. Oxygenated blood must be circulating, under pressure, for the VeinID to work. This cannot be spoofed with a fake or severed finger,” he says.

It is one thing that your finger can never be misused by others, but what kind of data is being stored when you sign up for Fingopay?

“Your finger vein is never stored, anywhere. We create a ‘Finger Vein Template,’ a FVT. This is an encoded representation of the scanned finger vein. It is encrypted as soon as it is captured by the Fingopay scanner and is never stored unencrypted. Your FVT, which is unusable by anyone else, is stored in a secure database,” says Simon Binns.

Are you ready to pay with your body?

Even though it seems as if we have got a lot of new payment methods, it actually takes a lot of time to get people used to it and accept new ways of paying, explains Esben Torpe Jørgensen.

“Even though you have a lot of payment methods available, 20 percent of all purchases are paid with cash, and one can wonder, how it can stay alive. But that’s what we experience in general, that within payment, it takes a long time to change people’s habits,” he says and adds:

“Introducing the contactless Dankort, however, has changed habits in record time. In a matter of a few years, we went from zero payments, to 50 percent of all payments being made with contactless cards. That was a matter of changing our habits from putting in the card in the terminal, to just touching the terminal with the card. Otherwise, it has taken a long time to teach people how to pay in new ways.”

And the same goes for Fingopay. Esben Torpe Jørgensen does not think that we will have a full-scale finger-pay system in Denmark for five or ten years to come, as it is difficult to replace a technology that is already functioning so well.

“Our hypothesis is that it is difficult to get people away from the card payments, simply because it is functioning so well. We think that biometrics is the future, and we want to see, whether people are ready to pay in this way and investigate use cases where biometrics payment can be an advance to physical cards or mobile,” he says.

Kim Frølund is excited that Spisestuerne is going to be a frontrunner in terms of introducing new payment methods and technology.

“It’s going to be exciting to see how many people decide to take up this solution and try it out. I’m definitely going to sign up myself. I’m curious about new technology,” says Kim Frølund.

Pay with your face

Even though CBS is the first place in the world to have Fingopay in a self-service environment, the VeinID technology has been used before. Simon Binns explains that 80,000 ATMs in Japan have the VeinID technology.

Furthermore, Esben Torpe Jørgensen explains that Amazon is currently testing biometric payment based on face recognition in their Amazon Go stores.

“When you enter the store, your face will immediately be recognized. Whenever you are done getting the things you need, you just leave the store. A lot of tests like these are going on right now, but we won’t see anything commercially until later in the future,” he says.

As for now, it is possible to pay with your finger in several shops in the UK, however, signing up with your Dankort at CBS, does not give you the possibility to pay with your finger in the UK.

“But we are in talks for a wider roll out,” states Simon Binns.