The future of payment systems - A case study on digiPROOF, a fingerprint based payment system

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: A, UNITEC New Zealand, language: English, abstract: digiPROOF is a payment system which is based on biometrics and allows customers to pay with their fingerprint. EDEKA, a big German supermarket chain has introduced the digiPROOF system in one of their stores to test how customers accept the system. Up to now, customer reactions have been very positive and EDEKA is at the moment implementing the system in several other stores and plans to roll out the system Germany wide in the long run. In the past years a great variety of new and innovative payment systems have been introduced into the market. None of them however could gain a substantial market share and replace traditional payment methods. The aim of this dissertation was therefore to analyze if payment systems based on fingerprint technology have the potential to sustain in the market and if they might be able to supplement or even replace traditional payment systems. In order to assess digiPROOF a framework of success factors for payment systems was established in this dissertation. Subsequently a survey of users as well as non-users of the system was carried out and the digiPROOF system was evaluated according to the framework of success factors to draw a conclusion on whether fingerprint based payment systems are able to sustain successfully in the market and how the future payment market might look like. The approach of evaluating the system from a theoretical point of view through the framework of success factors and triangulating the results through empirical findings by questioning users as well as non-users allowed to draw a holistic picture and make a positive assumption on the future prospects of fingerprint based payment systems.