Travis CU bought the hardware, software and licensing from Dell Computers and set it up with help from the DigitalPersona Inc. support staff in Redwood City.

Each of the 14-branch credit union's 412 users still has passwords for the various applications, but they are linked to the desktop biometric reader. The server-based software resides in a Microsoft Active Directory environment and uses mathematical algorithms to remember a master template of the fingerprint, says George Skaff, vice president of marketing at DigitalPersona.

The process for setting up an individual user takes about 30 seconds and the system itself "is fairly easy to deploy. You can get it up and running out of the box in about two hours," adds Chip Mesec, a DigitalPersona senior product marketing manager.

What distinguishes the company's technology from others in the bustling biometric space, Skaff and Mesec say, is that it is server-based, allowing the authorizing credentials to be stored on desktops and the server, which allows users to access software from anywhere they might be on the network. DigitalPersona, which functions primarily as a reseller of its hardware, software or both through big outfits such as Dell and Gateway, says financial services customers are the largest single vertical among its client base of about 2,000, and that about 25 million end users are protected. The DigitalPersona system at Travis CU replaces an older biometric solution that was not used across the enterprise, Roark says. He says the new system cost approximately $47,000 to implement and while no return on that investment has been formally calculated, "we were spending about an hour a day of technician time to reset passwords. Figure that in with the loss of productivity from the end-user perspective, and I think if you did an ROI it would come out very favorably." Mesec at DigitalPersona says many of its clients use its technology to ensure the security of large cash transfers, as well as at the retail teller end. The company says its products' ability to produce audit trails of anyone who accesses a program and when, along with the basic security posture such authentication offers, should help institutions ensure compliance with the growing requirements imposed by GLB and the FFIEC. The latter's requirement for stronger two-factor authentication, among other rules, kicks in this fall and presumably can only help drive what's already a growing demand for biometrics. Fingerprint techniques account for about 43% of the market, according to the International Biometric Group, which also predicts overall U.S. biometric industry revenues to grow from about $2.2 billion this year to more than $5.7 billion in 2010. Integrating biometrics with other means of authentication also is an area of innovation, something Roark and his colleagues are working with at Travis CU. "We're an organization that believes in defense in depth," says the credit union's network security chief. "We're now testing combinations of biometrics and PINs as a kind of two-factor authentication approach, and we already have several layers of virus and spyware protection and firewalls. "We want to make our system easier for our employees to use, but we also don't want to be one of those organizations out there that have had to notify people that they've lost their data." –[email protected]