EXCLUSIVE – Wells Fargo wants to enable biometric authentication at its ATMs, Bank Innovation has learned.

“Palm prints are more accurate than fingerprints,” Ryan Miller, senior vice president, design and delivery leader in the Innovation Group at the bank, told Bank Innovation, “which is why we want to use it on our ATMs.”

Miller could not provide much detail for the timeline beyond saying “we’re currently working to deploy the technology soon.”

For these palmprint enabled ATMs, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo is working with one of the fintechs from the 2017 batch of its accelerator program.

That fintech is called Redrock Biometrics, which joined Wells Fargo’s six-month accelerator program, back in October.

ATMs are a big deal for American banks. One report suggests there are over 400,000 machines all over the country. Wells Fargo has 13,000 ATMs, according to its Q3’17 report.

Indeed, Wells Fargo has been paying attention to these machines. Last year, it announced a one-time passcode capability that lets its users withdraw cash at an ATM with just that code.

“The last couple years have been largely about security and cybersecurity,” Miller said, explaining why Wells Fargo’s is paying a lot of attention of highly secure methods of authentication like biometrics.

Aside from palm-print, voice is another important technology for Wells Fargo.

“During the year, we will be expanding voice biometrics to more of our contact centers,” Miller said.

To learn more about biometrics join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to register.