Amazon One: Palm scanner launched, what is the impact on commercial security industry

Amazon launches a palm scanner to facilitate secure payments in 2 of its Seattle stores. In a blog post by Dilip Kumar, Vice President Physical Retail & Technology at Amazon, the company introduced the new palm reader as “a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store, presenting a loyalty card, entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work more effortless. The service is designed to be highly secure and uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique palm signature.”

 

Amazon One will be added to the company’s “Amazon Go” as a convenient choice for customers to use to enter the store to shop. In most retail environments, Amazon One could become an alternate payment or loyalty card option with a device at the checkout counter next to a traditional point of sale system. The company also mentions entering a building or facility as well as time and attendance as an option “Amazon One could be part of an existing entry point to make accessing the location quicker and easier.”

 

Amazon saw several advantages in selecting palm recognition mentioning improved privacy protection and contactless identification, a feature that echoes with potential consumers at Covid-19 times. At the moment Amazon One doesn’t require an amazon account to register, just a mobile phone number and a credit card. 

 

 

Amazon’s palm reader is not a ground breaking product in terms of technology, but it is an interesting attempt on Amazon’s behalf to compete with smartphone payments like apple pay or Google pay. Amazon’s Go main advantage is that it doesn’t require a smartphone to make payments, only a secure palm scan. Commercial security is probably not the main market for this product at the moment, retail and payments is a much larger market where Amazon is more likely to compete, however this device might also impact the commercial security industry down the road:
 

1. Increased acceptance for biometric identification: adoption of biometric identification in access control is still slow, however, once there is a critical mass of users accustomed to using palm recognition for shopping, it will be easier for them to use it for access control purposes.
 

2. Amazon already has a foothold in the residential security market: in the future such a device can be added to a Ring device for door opening
 

3. Amazon Web Services provide it with the infrastructure needed to deploy such a solution in scale. Though Amazon is not present in the Access Control as a Service market at the moment, there isn’t much stopping it from moving in: it has the infrastructure and the devices, and in case they want to buy their way into the market, they have enough money to acquire one of the incumbents to get access to their client base and sales force. 

 

We don’t think Amazon will be moving into commercial security any time soon, the retail market is much more lucrative, but we could see the effects of this initiative down the road.