Security is continuously an important concern for
most Information Technology-related industries, especially the
banking industry. The banking industry is concerned with
protecting and securing the privacy and data of their customers,
as well as their transactions. The adoption of biometric
technology as a means of identifying and authenticating
individuals has been proposed as one of the varied solutions to
many of the security challenges faced by the banking industry. In
this paper, the authors address the ATM transaction
authentication problem of banking transactions using fingerprint
identification as one form of biometric authentication. The novel
methodology adopted proposes the use of an online off-card
fingerprint verification, which involves the matching of live
fingerprint (templates) with pre-stored templates read from the
ATM smart card. The experimental evaluation of the proposed
methodology presents a system that offers a faster and relatively
better security of authentication, as compared to previous and
existing methodologies. Moreover, the use of BioHASH templates
ensures an irreversible cryptographic hash function, facilitates a
faster authentication, and enables an efficient framework of
detecting potential duplicates of banking account holders.