The Eyes Have It
August 31, 2010
Jeff Carter either is either in charge of selling the most transformational technology that will come to banking, indeed to human identification, in recent memory, or he's the most delusional former banker you'll ever meet.
Carter, a former Bank of America executive who once ran the company's partnership with MIT to create the Center for Future Banking, is now Chief Business Development and Strategy Officer at Global Rainmakers, a New York-based biometric firm that is convinced its high-speed, low-cost iris scan technology will be everywhere a decade from now-from identifying consumers at a liquor store to prove they're of age, to entering an office building, to paying for purchases online and at the point of sale. "We see this as being ubiquitous. We want to create a global identity service bureau," Carter says. "We're not talking about evolving, we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way everything takes place."
Given biometrics' continual failure to live up to the promises, it's easy to dismiss the vision. But it's tougher to argue when you see the size and scale of some of Global Rainmaker's early access-control implementations: The Pentagon uses it, Air Force bases use it, Bank of America scans thousands of people per day when they enter the company's headquarters in Charlotte. Last month Global Rainmakers announced that in the city of Leon, Mexico, hundreds devices will be installed to first identify criminals, and later in commercial establishments to identify consumers.
There are also several other high-profile, still top secret implementations that give the product plenty of credibility. Stay tuned for those, in the meantime more bank deployments are not far off. Florida-based Tech Imagine, which has deployed Panini check image scanners in more than 5,000 locations in Latin America, recently announced its intention to pitch the iris scans to its customers, which include Citibank and Banco Santander.
What sets Global Rainmaker's tech apart from the biometric hype of the past is that the company spent the last three years creating high-throughput devices that are scaleable and relatively cheap. An archway style device can positively identify up to 50 people a minute as they walk underneath; participants don't even need to stop-they just look up at the cameras mounted on the crossbeam. The technology uses infrared light to help identify the unique aspects of the iris, which, perhaps surprisingly, have nothing to do with eye color. Iris scans aren't foolproof though, polarized or reflective glasses pose a problem for identification, as does human obfuscation. "Yes, it's true, if you close your eyes it won't work," Carter acknowledges.
But the company believes iris identification technology is superior to fingerprints or other biometrics because the average iris has more than 2,000 points of uniqueness that don't change from birth until death, according to Global Rainmaker's top scientist and co-founder Keith Hanna. Global Rainmakers is primarily an intellectual property holding company-19 patents and counting- with plans to license the iris scan technology to consultants and security integrators in the government and corporate sectors, but intends to save the consumer identification space for themselves.
Some patents are related to how the technology tests for "live-ness," others are related to using iris identification to authenticate financial transactions. And that's really where Carter and company co-founder Hector Hoyos see the technology going. Being part of multi-modal biometric security at the Pentagon is nice, but the company has a bigger vision in mind. They think banks will start with ATMs and in-bank transactions, but by the time the Consumer Electronics Show rolls around next year, Global Rainmakers intends to have the device installed on several cell phone models. The logical extension of that is to use the identification methodology for securing mobile transactions and other forms of payments.
