29 Oct 2006 AntiMatter   » (Observer)

This is about the evolution that is taking place in the Pakistani Banking industry. Tameer microfinance bank, has now been set up for more than an year now. This is the first Pakistani Bank whose entire IT infrastucture is based on Open Source technologies. The most exciting thing about this microcredit bank is that they have for the first time introduced ATMs in general and Biometric ATMs in perticular, with the help and assistance of technology company Aerocar, into the Pakistani Microcredit Banking Arena. These ATMs are deployed at twelve far-fledged areas of Karachi (Business centre of Pakistan).

These ATMs are completely based on Open Source technologies with Linux running at the heart of all affairs. Most of the ATMs at the moment are running on windows implementing the famous XFS standard. At present there is no framework, as opposed to windows, for the implementation of transaction processing services on Linux. The present approach deals with this problem with a view to develop a framework to:

(a) Integrate devices from different vendors into the linux. (b) Integrate vendor independent communication protocols for transaction processing.

This type of low cost indigenous biometric solution could encourage safe and secure financial transactions for the banking industry in general and microfinance banking industry in perticular. As the microfinance banking mostly deals with the low income and illiterate sector, who are not very comfortable with pin numbers, fingerprint authentication is the natural choice for them.

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