Vein scanners could soon replace contactless cards

Forget your PIN. Ditch your contactless cards. The payment method of the future is going to look under your skin, identifying you by the pattern of your veins. 

This sci-fi concept is FingoPay (winner of ShortList's best product name of 2016), a biometric scanning system currently being developed by British start-up Sthaler (winner of ShortList's most unpronounceable company name of 2016). 

"The FingoPay reader builds a 3D map of veins within a finger, creating a natural personal key," explains the company's website. "Each finger is unique to us, the chance that two people have the same vein structure is 3.4billion-to-1. It has better recognition than iris and much more socially active." That makes it more secure than a four-digit PIN and an iris scanner. 

The system works by associating your vein structure with your bank account: rather than paying for items in a shop with a contactless card, you'd be able to tap your finger to a Fi-D reader and pay in a process that would take under five seconds. No cards, no key pads, just a zap of intense light on your finger to read your vein structure. 

Sthaler's founder Nick Dryden told The Telegraph that the FingoPay system will undergo a trial in September at Proud, a nightclub in Camden, London, where it's hoped the system will speed up the process of paying for drinks. 

The technology has already been used in small-scale tests, such as 2012's Festival No. 6 in Portmeirion, North Wales. McDonald's and Co-Op are also experimenting with uses of the tech, while some 80,000 of Japan's ATMs already use a similar vein-scanning technology.

Now we just have to sit back and wait for the first creepy stories of robbers snipping off fingers to access bank accounts...