Denmark’s Copenhagen Business School will be one of the first institutions in the world to enable students to make purchases in a campus restaurant and coffee shop using only their finger.

As reported by Planet Biometrics, the new biometric payment initiative will be delivered by a partnership between Danish debit card provider, Dankort, and British fintech firm, Sthaler.

The system will use Sthaler’s Fingopay reader that leverages Hitachi’s VeinID technology and infrared light to map the unique 3D pattern of veins in a customer’s finger. The resulting biometric signature represents a one-of-a-kind, personal identifier. The biometric signature can be used to verify both identity and payment in seconds.

As of last month, the 21,000 Copenhagen Business School students and 600 full-time academic staff were all able to use Fingopay in the campus canteen.

A similar deployment has previously been implemented on the Brunel University campus in London, where students are paying at the till using Fingopay to identify themselves. In that installation, some 1,000 students at Brunel University have already signed up to pay for their groceries with only their finger. But the implementation at Copenhagen Business School represents the first instance of the solution being used in a self-service restaurant application.

Finger vein payments have grown in popularity across Europe and some spot implementations in Asia, with other use cases including physical access and workforce management.

The biometric payment initiative is also recognition that, in the future, the payment card may not necessarily be plastic. Whether app-based or biometric, Dankort sees initiatives like that at the Copenhagen Business School as a vital first step toward life beyond physical cards.

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