Shoppers in France could soon be able to use their finger to pay for everyday shopping, in a move that aims to tackle fraud and speed up supermarket queues.
High-street bank Accord has been given permission by the French data protection authorities to start a six-month trial into the new biometric payment system.
The idea had been rejected by the Commission Nationale Informatique et Liberté on several occasions in the past because of fears that storing fingerprint data posed a privacy and security risk.
However the new system developed by Accord records the unique pattern of veins underneath a person's index finger - not the fingerprint itself.