How tech is transforming your signature

Published: Thursday 14th March 2019

Once upon a time, your signature was something you reserved solely for chequebooks, passports and your grannie’s card, but biometric fingerprint tech is taking the meaning of a ‘signature,’ and spinning it on its head.

Natwest’s fingerprint card

We’ve all thought of the day when we’ll have chips under our skin instead of bank cards, but it’s usually just shrugged off as a pipe dream. Not anymore with Natwest’s new way of using a bank card. It’s not quite a tiny chip, but the card itself reads your fingerprint using biometric fingerprint tech.

So you don’t have to punch in your 4 digit pin at the till.

The trials are being undergone with the Royal Bank of Scotland, with around 200 test subjects. We’d give anything to try it out!

With tech like this becoming the norm, it makes scribbling your signature on a sheet made from bark a bit, dare we say, old-fashioned?

Mastercard’s signature epiphany

That might be why even Mastercard have realised that they’re pretty obsolete by doing away with the requirement of a signature with every purchase made using their cards. They’re now moving into this century with “chips, tokenization, biometric fingerprint and other newer and more secure methods”.

Yes, it may have been to combat an actual threat of credit card fraud but if we’ve seen anything in movies, no one really checks the signatures match, right?

Smart guns, yay or nay?

We’ve seen fingerprint tech for years on our phones, but how would you feel if the same tech was taken and applied to say, a gun? Yep, that’s right companies are springing up everywhere selling ‘smart guns’ that read your biometric fingerprint.

The Washington ceasefire president thinks this could be the answer to lowering gun crime and suicide rates with a lot of deaths caused by stolen federal guns. The gun has only one user fingerprint attached to it, meaning that if the wrong person picks it up, the gun won’t unlock.

We won’t hold our breath on whether Trump will agree with this piece of tech though…

Sign a will with the touch of a finger

We’re also seeing the legal side taking the side of tech. There’s always that movie that shows people signing the most important document of their lives with an ‘X’. You start to wonder if they’re illiterate and can’t spell their name, but it’s true that your signature doesn’t need to look anything like your name.

In some cases, people are too severely impaired to physically write their signature, on say, a will. So legislators have come up with a tech-savvy alternative, fingerprint signatures. These are as legal as a traditional signature and are now fully accepted in cases where a written signature isn’t available.

So, are signatures obsolete? With eSignature software, you can keep the satisfaction of signing something with your carefully designed signature, but we’ll take care of the rest. Meaning your eSignature will always be legal and tamper-proof. Maybe we’ll even get involved with biometric fingerprint tech soon…