A couple of weeks ago I thoroughly lambasted NCR over an RFID-enabled product it introduced to the banking community (see “NCR takes RFID toward the creepy side”). The gist is that customers carrying an RFID-embedded ATM card would be scanned at the bank entrance by an NCR portal (“Similar to the [security] portal at a store’s exit doors” according to the press release) and VIP customers could be flagged for personal greetings or special services.
What was really eyebrow-raising was the explanation that “the information from the card could be sent to a teller station, the branch manager’s PC or a personal digital assistant (PDA).” It was, well, downright creepy.
NCR PR princess Lorraine Russell thought I was too harsh on the company and hounded me (well, she e-mailed me twice) until I’d agree to talk to Mark Grossi, NCR’s CTO for Financial Solutions, who is heavily quoted in the press release, and Paul Race, director of Innovation Marketing. We had a chat last week by phone as Grossi and Race are at NCR’s lab in Dundee, Scotland.
As I expected, the press release may have been a bit glib and it was directed at the potential customer, the banking industry. Too bad that it was released into cyberspace for all to read without the benefit of a technical sidebar explaining exactly how the system would work.
Grossi explained that the card would simply send an encrypted ID number to the portal which would send it on to the bank’s backend processor where the account would be examined for any special needs (forms to be signed, pending transactions, new offerings, etc.), which could be forwarded to the teller station, manager’s desk or other appropriate personnel. That transmission would be protected by the existing safeguards in the bank’s network.
But could the mere existence of an RFID-embedded bank card signal that the person carrying it was a “person of interest” to a would-be robber? Not really, according to Race, as the target market would be any bank customer with an ATM card, but it would also be an opt-in system so that a customer wouldn’t necessarily have to have an RFID-enabled ATM card.
It’s not the “creepy” system that the press release led me to believe and could allow personalization through identity systems (something I’m in favor of) to get a good foothold in retail systems. Still, there was another problem I’d mentioned and Grossi and I ran off down memory lane as he answered my concern. More on that in the next issue.
Copyright © 2006 IDG Communications, Inc.