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Las Vegas Vendor Bets on Built-In Card Reader

A company called SmartMetric Inc. is pushing biometric fingerprint readers with a twist: the reader is built into a credit card.

The device is meant to be used for online purchases with a card reader that plugs into a home computer, but SmartMetric is also working on a version that could be used with automated teller machines.

"We built quite a powerful computer that fits inside the credit card to do the scanning," said Colin Hedrick, the Las Vegas company's president.

The card would be sold through merchants, but SmartMetric, which announced the product Thursday, is also talking with two banks in Australia about using it for online security.

The ATM version would be attached to its own reloadable account rather than tied directly to a bank account.

Users would program the card with their credit card account number, billing address, and shipping address. The account number and billing address could be reprogrammed, such as when the user's credit card expires.

With online purchases, the card would transfer the data directly to the appropriate fields on a merchant's Web site once the buyers authenticate themselves.

SmartMetric, founded in 2002, said this method makes shopping online safer because bypassing the keyboard prevents this information from being made visible to keylogging viruses. The card and reader cost $70 for consumers.

The device functions like software that already comes with stand-alone biometric fingerprint readers. That software also fills in passwords and other information.

Some software provides the keylogger-thwarting features without relying on biometric hardware. Orbiscom Inc. of New York makes software for companies such as PayPal Inc., Citigroup Inc, and Discover Financial Services LLC, which generates a one-time credit or debit card number for online purchases.

Mr. Hedrick said his device has an advantage over software alternatives because software must reside on a machine and the SmartMetric card is portable.

Other companies have adapted biometric hardware for financial use, such as Solidus Inc., whose TrueMe service is meant to work for online banking authentication but does not require special readers. It can work with the readers already built into Lenovo Group Ltd.'s ThinkPad notebook computers as well as with some readers sold in stores for other purposes.

Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at Gartner Inc., a market research company in Stamford, Conn., said that consumers like biometrics, but the $70 fee is "a showstopper."

They have balked at cheaper security devices, such as a USB drive that can also store music files, so it is doubtful they would spend $70 on a stand-alone device, Ms. Litan said.

Though it would protect against keylogging viruses, it may not provide much additional protection, she said. "All bets are off when your PC is hijacked." Instead of targeting the keyboard, she said, many viruses go after the browser and could read the information from it and even modify it.