Mastercard, RBC to test payments -- with heartbeats...

MasterCard, RBC to test if the heart is always true, for payments at least
3 hours ago

By Euan Rocha

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canadian startup Bionym, maker of a wearable security device dubbed Nymi, is teaming up with credit card giant MasterCard Inc and Royal Bank of Canada to test whether the beat of your heart is true enough to verify payments.

The Nymi wristband, which authenticates identity by using a person's cardiac rhythm, is designed to eliminate the need for passwords, pin codes and even keys.

The trial will allow Royal Bank (RBC), Canada's largest bank, Mastercard and customers using the technology to test electrocardiogram-authenticated payments before the end of the year, Bionym said in a statement on Monday.

"We're continuing to work to provide customers increased choice how they pay," RBC head of payment innovation Jeremy Bornstein said in a statement. "Once their wristband is activated, they can leave their phone at home while they go for a run or run an errand, and conveniently and securely buy a coffee or groceries with a tap of the wrist."

The new technology comes at a time when large retailers across North America have been grappling with data breaches and the theft of account numbers and other information from payment cards used by customers.

U.S. retailer Target Corp is still recovering from a major breach last year that resulted in the theft of 40 million payment card numbers and 70 million other pieces of customer data such as email addresses and phone numbers.

Michaels Stores, the biggest U.S. arts and crafts retailer, said in May it had suffered a security breach that may have affected about 2.6 million payment cards.

In March, Visa Inc and MasterCard launched a cross-industry group to improve security for card transactions and press U.S. retailers and banks to meet a 2015 deadline to adopt technology that would make it safer to pay with plastic.

Bionym said its Nymi wristband is the world's first biometrically authenticated wearable payment pilot. It said it believes the technology could result in faster, easier financial payments with less risk.

The Toronto-based company recently raised $14 million in funding from range of investors, including Ignition Partners, MasterCard, Relay Ventures, Export Development Canada and Salesforce.com.

Bionym unveiled its new payment technology at Money2020, a financial innovation convention being held this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Peter Galloway)


http://news.yahoo.com/mastercard-rbc-test-heart-always-true-payments-least-163720522--sector.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more