Biometrics In Retail: Reduce Your Shrinkage And Payroll Losses While Improving Productivity

Using passwords to authenticate employee access to computers, cash registers, and other resources subjects retailers to significant risk of financial loss, coupled with a heavy burden of password support. Increasingly, retailers are turning to biometric fingerprint authentication – which uses an employee's fingerprint to generate a unique and hack-proof "personal barcode" – to verify an end-user's identity and authorization to use a system.

Fingerprint authentication is a password-free Single Sign-on solution that can be used easily by retailers to:

• Improve security, access control, and accountability company-wide.
• Reduce shrinkage at the cash register.
• Track time and attendance and eliminate buddy punching.
• Help relieve HR of the mountains of paperwork which complex benefits programs entail.
• Eliminate the heavy cost of password management and support.
• Help comply with laws requiring auditable protection of credit card numbers, customer information, medical information, and corporate financial records.

A key driver of rising retail operating costs is the use of passwords. Passwords serve as "the keys" to let employees gain access to the tools needed to do their jobs. A password authenticates its user – who is the only person who is supposed to know it – as the person authorized to have the access in question. Passwords are used to open cash registers, access employee benefits applications, clock in and out of work, open locked doors, and log in to the store's or company's computer networks.

But passwords have proved vulnerable to unauthorized use, and many laws have been enacted which require companies – including retailers -- to protect vital private customer information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, personal health records, and corporate financial records. These laws require companies to be able to prove that access has been controlled and is audited.