Chicago firm offers payments made with a wave of the hand
Mobile payment company Keyo has developed a palm scanning point-of-sale terminal that enables users to make a purchase by waving their hand. By connecting their palm print to their credit or debit card, customers are able to authenticate transactions without their wallet or smartphone. If a user's account isn't used in a year, the palm scan is deleted to reduce the chance of account fraud. Several Chicago-based firms have adopted the technology.

Keyo Simplifies Mobile Payments to a Hand Wave

August 28, 2017 By: Steven Anderson

I think we can all agree that mobile payments in their current form aren’t exactly complex. Pull out your phone, tap a few commands, maybe even just tap a device against a point-of-sale terminal. A new Chicago firm, as related to the Chicago Tribune, details how mobile payments can be effectively reduced to the wave of a hand.

The firm behind this advance is Keyo, and it works using biometrics to connect to a credit or debit card. The user’s palm print is the primary focus here, so users can scan their hand and have the card in question charged. Since there’s no personal payment information transmitted to the stores, a potential point of failure in security is removed from the equation, and that makes the process safer. Perhaps most interesting of all, the palm scan is deleted if the account isn’t used in a year, so that helps reduce the chances of inactive account fraud.

The whole concept started, reports noted, when the company’s CEO Jaxon Klein and his wife went shopping one day, but forgot their wallet. They had a huge list but had to come home empty handed, which led Klein to the notion of an unforgettable wallet. Biometrics made the perfect alternative.

It’s not out of line to suggest that this would work. After all, you can forget to bring your wallet, you can forget your smartphone, but good luck forgetting your hand. The best part is that this can be just an option, an add-on to a mobile app or the like that makes it an easy backup for those times when you forget your wallet or phone.

There’s a lot of potential in a platform like this. While biometric payments suffer from a bit of a PR problem thanks to the whole “mark of the beast” concept, as long as these are just an option in a field that includes mobile payments, cash, checks and everything else, it’s just one more advancement like the internal combustion engine or the internet itself.

Keyo has a noteworthy idea here, and it’s already started showing up in some Chicago-area firms. It may well catch on before too much longer, and making payments may be as easy as a wave of the hand.