NCR Corp. is building fingerprint scanning and verification systems from Solidus Networks Inc. into some machines instead of retrofitting in the field or bolting on Solidus-compliant hardware before shipment.
Solidus, of San Francisco, announced the deal last week amid a flurry of news on its recent deals and purchases.
NCR, of Dayton, Ohio, said it has already shipped the first of the machines - color-screen kiosks at which people enroll in Solidus' Pay By Touch system - to a top-10 supermarket chain. The Solidus system will also be integrated into point of sale terminals.
Solidus has worked with NCR for five years, but the new machines will make it easier and faster for merchants to install Pay By Touch payment systems, said Ryan Ross, Solidus' vice president of global alliances.
They will also provide a consistent user experience from store to store, he said. That is important, he said, because someone who enrolls at one Solidus-client merchant can use the Pay By Touch fingerprint system at any other participating merchant without enrolling again.
Mr. Ross said that many current fingerprint scanners look like "a combination of things" fused together.
Solidus' merchant customers use fingerprint readers at cash registers. Consumers enroll in a merchant's system by providing a fingerprint and payment information, such as a bank account or credit card number; on later visits they can authorize payments from any of their accounts with a fingerprint.
The new NCR machines will also enable Solidus to offer new services, he said. For example, he said, the biometric readers can function as a time clock for employees or in place of the cards that store managers use to override prices at the checkout line.
For such common retail processes, "we become the biometric engine," he said.
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at the Stamford, Conn., market research company Gartner Inc., said these acquisitions and alliances may be necessary for Solidus because biometrics is hard to sell by itself.
"They're diversifying, which tells me they really don't have much retail opportunity" for their fingerprint readers alone, she said. "Biometrics is becoming kind of like the icing on the cake, but they need the cake."
There is a very narrow audience for biometrics, she said. "The only ones that need it, I think, are the retailers that want really speedy, sexy checkout."
And the demand for biometric payments may be small for even this market, she said. "Contactless cards do a better job than biometrics if you're interested in speedy checkout."
Solidus bought CardSystems Solutions Inc., a merchant payment processing provider, on Dec. 9. On Dec. 6 it said it had agreed to buy BioPay LLC, a Herndon, Va., rival, for $82 million.
On Dec. 1, Solidus bought Capture Resource Inc. of Bristol, Pa., a loyalty software and service company.
