Treviglas Community College uses Uniware system for cashless biometric payments

The days of bullies stealing lunch money may soon be over.

Making a move to improve speed, safety and to ensure every student eats a hot meal at lunch, Treviglas Community College in England has introduced a Upay cashless biometric system in the school’s cafeteria, Thisiscornwall.co.uk reported.

Manufactured by Uniware Systems Inc., the Upay cafeteria payment system works using local fingerprint authentication.

According to an official Treviglas communication to parents, this system not only makes payment easy, but it prevents the need for students to carry cash to school and also will replace the alienating system in which students entitled to subsidized school meals need to sign for their food each day.

The Upay system does not store digital fingerprint records en masse – instead, the system interprets fingerprint pin points and uses a 128bit algorithm to convert and ecrypt this data into a number. This unique identifying number is then saved against user cashless accounts and used to authorize a payment. According to Uniware, this data alone is not sufficient to reproduce a fingerprint.

According to an Educatering Magazine feature earlier this year, cashless systems such as the Upay are also beneficial in terms of profit and planning. As students making use of this system will not be able to squander their money and spend it elsewhere, cafeterias will be operating more poriftably.  In addition, they will also have a much richer dataset from which to plan popular meals and understand consumption patterns.

What do you think: Can cashless biometric payment systems replace cash payments safely? 

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometrics  |  cashless payment  |  data encryption  |  fingerprint  |  Recognition