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Top1. Introduction
Biometric technologies are becoming of increasing interest in many aspects of modern life. It is now not uncommon to encounter fingerprint sensors in High Street stores, in bars and even in schools [BBC News, 2007]. The biometrics technology industry understandably sees the financial services sector as a key market for the technologies [Coventry, 2004, Most, 2004], with its continued push to use of self-service banking channels, such as the Internet, interactive voice response (IVR) telephone banking, mobile phone banking and automated teller machines (ATM). With self-service channels there can be security and customer authentication concerns that the use of biometric technologies could address.
This paper is concerned with biometric technologies at the ATM. Countries such as Chile, Columbia, Japan, Pakistan and Poland already use ATMs equipped with biometric technology. Recent figures show that ATM fraud losses (counterfeit card fraud) in UK amounted to some £81 million in 2009-10 (The UK Cards Association, 2010), a drop of 52% from 2008-9 figures while, annual ATM losses in Europe were approaching 500 million Euros (www.scmagazineuk.com, 2009), data which include a rise of 149% in attacks on ATMs. One solution to this fraud problem is to add another level of security at the ATM by including biometric technology. There are a number of different biometric technologies that can be employed on ATMs, and it is known that usability and user experience issues can affect biometric technology performance (Fernandez-Saavedra, 2010), and that user acceptance could affect the performance and the success of implementation. The relationship between these factors has been found to be complex (Fernandez-Saavedra, 2010; Riley et al., 2007), but it is argued (Coventry, 2004) that the user experience aspect is central to the successful deployment of biometric technologies. The goal of the research presented here was to compare and contrast customer attitudes to usability in deployment of fingerprint and palmvein technologies on ATMs, and to contribute to the better understanding of the issues surrounding the implementation of biometrics from a user experience perspective - the importance of considering the end user of a biometric system has been stressed by earlier research (Ashbourn 2000; Chandra & Calderon, 2005; Langenderfer & Linnhoff, 2005).