Talk about seeing the collision before it happens. A big bang is shaping up inside financial institutions where on one side are skeptics about biometrics used in lieu of passwords – be it voice or eye print or fingerprint – and on the other side are increasing numbers of senior executives as well as plain customers who frankly despair about how unreliable, indeed broken, the old fashioned username/password has become.

Many experts say the username/password login dates back 50 years, to the early days of mainframe computers.

The problem with username/password is twofold. Strong ones are tough to remember and easy to forget. They also – increasingly – are stolen, usually by hackers who break into a system and steal literally hundreds of thousands of them.