Sunflower Market's Will Use Pay By Touch

Supervalu To Use Pay By Touch in New Sunflower Market's

New Value-Priced Sunflower Market(TM) Makes its Chicago Debut in Lincoln Park

What: A Preview Party at Sunflower Market, a new organic and natural food market designed to meet the increasing customer demand for natural and organic foods at value prices

When: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 from 5 pm-8 pm
Where: Lincoln Park 1910 North Clybourn Chicago, IL 60614

Why: To provide the media a "sneak peek" at this exciting new concept in organic and natural foods.

How is it different? Sunflower Market is able to offer high quality organic and
natural foods for less because its operations are built around an efficient and smart store:

It's smart use of technology eliminates unnecessary costs:

-- It's the first natural and organic foods store to offer self checkout

-- It's also the first grocery store of any kind in the nationwhose products are 100 percent scan-able. An automated scalesystem allows customers to self-label all products sold by the pound resulting in a far speedier check-out process

It uses Pay-By-Touch(TM) technology. The first natural and organic foods store to do so, its biometric system links checking/debit account information to a digital fingerprint to simplify the check-out process

Supervalu appears to be going the way of Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Wild Oats and others with a new organic and natural foods store concept under the Sunflower Market banner. The first unit is scheduled to open in January in Indianapolis.

In a released statement, Jeff Noddle, chairman and CEO of Supervalu, said, "Across the nation, we are seeing a growing demand for affordable organic foods with exceptional taste and nutritional quality. Sunflower Market draws on our expertise in small-box formats, and leverages our supply chain expertise, which enables us to deliver outstanding natural and organic products at a price point consistent with consumer expectations."

Supervalu's president for corporate retail, John Hooley, added in the same release, "At Sunflower Market, we will offer customers the convenience of a full shopping experience, with access to natural and organic products in all categories. We've developed a unique merchandising approach that will highlight our perishables, which include an extensive produce offering, natural, case-ready meats and fresh bakery and deli items. Simply put, our goal is to provide customers with great tasting, wholesome foods at affordable prices."

The typical Sunflower Market is expected to run 12,000 to 15,000 square-feet and stock between 8,000 and 12,000 skus.

The stores will have a heavy emphasis on private label with the Supervalu's specialty produce company, W. Newell & Co., providing most of the banner's fruit and vegetable needs. Sunflower Market will also carry over 100 items under Supervalu's new "Nature's Best" brand.

Supervalu will operate all Sunflower Markets as corporate stores and will provide the banner with information technology, merchandising and operations support.

Good Morning America Video

Video: What Makes a Supermarket 'Super'?
...And when it's time to pay, 2,000 stores have installed a pay by touch system that reads your fingerprint and debits your bank account in about 15 seconds...

William Newsom Joins Board of Directors

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/

Pay By Touch announced that the Honorable William Newsom, former Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeals at San Francisco, has joined the company's board of directors.

"Judge Newsom's exceptional legal and financial counsel makes him an excellent addition to our board of directors," said John Rogers, CEO of Pay By Touch. "His civic and socially-responsible interests are also in line with the values of Pay By Touch. We are delighted to have him serve the company."

"Pay By Touch has an experienced team in place to bring a unique product to market," said Judge Newsom. "I am pleased to be a part of this exciting endeavor."

Judge Newsom is president of Newsom Associates and trust administrator of the Gordon Getty Family Trust. He is also one of the original investors in Pay By Touch. He was appointed an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal at San Francisco in 1978, after which he was elected twice to twelve-year terms. His son, Gavin, is currently mayor of San Francisco.

Judge Newsom's early career as a lawyer included time spent working with Willick, Wheat, Geary, Adams, & Charles as well as with James Martin MacInnis and Getty Oil Italiana, where he served as in-house counsel for the corporation's office in Rome. His responsibilities to the Getty Family later included service as a Trustee for several of the family's trusts and foundations. The Getty Trust is one of Pay By Touch's largest investors.

Judge Newsom is a Trustee for the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Legal Defense, the Sierra Club Foundation and the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund. He is also a Director of The Wildlife Conservancy and the Mountain Lion Foundation.

Fingerprint sensors improve security of PCs

AFTER HAVING been used for decades as an important tool in catching bad guys, fingerprints are now coming to the fore in preventing identity theft. That is, not letting the bad guys get a chance to steal at all.

Two privately held companies in the Bay Area have made names for themselves in using your fingerprints to protect your identity and your assets. UPEK Inc. of Emeryville produces the underlying technology that senses the three-dimensional ridges on your digits and packages that information for use in laptops and other devices.

For instance, its customer, San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, uses UPEK know-how to make payment systems inviolate.

UPEK's revenues topped $30 million in 2005. In July, UPEK won recognition by AlwaysOn as one of its Top 100 Private Company award winners. Pay By Touch also was named to the list.

Pay By Touch was formed by the acquisition of Oakland company Indivos Corp. by San Francisco-based Solidus Networks Inc. in 2003. The company has raised about $240 million in investment capital and has a valuation of over $3 billion dollars already.

While Pay By Touch is starting to market a thumb reader to gain access to your desktop computer, its bigger business has been selling fingerprint-sensing scanners to retailers for their checkout counters.

Under the name Indivos, its technology was first deployed in Berkeley at High Tech Burrito in 1998 and in Seattle's Thriftway supermarket in 2002.

After its 2004-2005 adoption by grocer Piggly Wiggly in South Carolina, "a number of national chains have deployed our technology, but none of them has started here in the Bay Area," said Caroline McNally, executive vice president of branding.

The customer who pays by pressing a thumb to the reader need not carry a card. "The consumer can add whatever payment type she prefers, such as Albertsons preferred card, checking account number or debit, etc.," McNally said.

Acuity Market Intelligence Editor Maxine Most commended the San Francisco company, Pay By Touch, which has more than 700 employees.

"It's costing merchants lots of money to process cards. Pay By Touch is the only (biometric) company that has really penetrated the consumer marketplace."

Most recently lost her own laptop. "I didn't worry about the laptop because I could replace it. I didn't worry about the data because I had backed it up. I was worried about identity theft. So now I'm going to set it up so I have a thumb sensor. In the next few years, fingerprint sensors will be standard on PDAs and laptops," Most predicted.

Business Writer Francine Brevetti can be reached at
fbrevetti@angnewspapers.com or (510) 208-6416

Kioskcom - You Will Be Paying by Finger?

Kioskcom Blog

Will You Be Paying by Finger?

It’s no surprise that Pay By Touch was recently listed as one of the top 100 privately-held companies, based on market potential, customer adoption and investor value.

The reason the San Francisco firm is so hot — and its payment technology for finger-scans is being used in 44 states and the UK — is that people apparently like using it.

In South Carolina, a story this week said Piggly Wiggly shoppers there like the idea of walking in the store with nothing more than lint in their pockets and walking out with a week’s worth of groceries.

NRF (National Retail Federation) VP David Hogan said that biometrics “is going to really take off.”


Pay by Touch is also pioneering a flourishing check cashing business, using finger scans to identify individuals for the purpose of cashing paychecks and government checks.

The system has already cashed more than $8 billion at retail stores and, just this month, it signed its first bank customer.

If you consider how payment technology has moved from coins and cash to credit and debit cards, the finger-scan technology is a natural next step.

Video of CEO Pitch is Live

John Rogers, CEO talks to the audience at the Stanford Summit about Pay By Touch.

According to John, Pay By Touch currently has about 2200 installations with 6000 under contract, but we're very close with 5 of the Top 10 retailers and he fully expects to have 20,000 under contract by the end of this quarter.

Click either picture to view the 6 minute presentation on streaming "Quicktime" video.

Mobil Rolls Out PBT in Missouri

Last Update: 7:02 AM CT Aug 10, 2006

From Finextra

Central Missouri consumers can now conveniently and securely pay for gas and snacks with the touch of a finger at 13 Mobil Gas Station Wallis Convenience Store locations.

"The system debits a shopper's checking account just like writing a check or using a debit card, but without having to hassle with wallets, cards, PINs, paper or checks," said Melissa Huntington, marketing manager of Wallis Oil.

"Because account numbers are not exposed, the technology is helping provide our customers with faster checkouts and more secure transactions."

The new service is powered by biometric payments leader Pay By Touch, which recently acquired all assets of BioPay and now operates the BioPay-branded biometric payment network throughout the country. In addition to added convenience, finger-scan payments provide the ultimate security. No one -- not even the store associate -- sees the account number or the payment method used to make purchases.

As an introductory offer, when customers sign up for the service at participating Mobil stores, they will receive a discount of 10 cents per gallon of gas purchased the first time they pay with their finger.

Signing up takes just minutes at the Mobil stores. To enroll, customers provide identification, checking account information and a finger scan. The system is free and secure, and customer information is never sold. Once signed up, customers can immediately make purchases with the touch of a finger at any retailer offering the BioPay-branded service.

"Paying with the touch of a finger is a win-win for consumers and merchants," said John Rogers, founder, chairman, and CEO of Pay By Touch. "Shoppers can conveniently and securely make purchases with the confidence that their personal information remains secure before, during and after the transaction."

The convenient BioPay-branded service is already available in the greater St. Louis area at Mid-Towne IGA in St. Charles, as well as at Home Service Oil Express Mart locations in Arnold and Seckman.

John Rogers CEO Pitch - Stanford Summit

Listen to PBT CEO John Rogers speak at the AO100 CEO Pitch (requires Real Player)

Pay By Touch Press Release

Click the Picture to Enlarge or read it on PBT Website by clicking headline.

Press Release addresses the news that Pay By Touch was named one of the Top 100 Private Companies in America by AlwaysOn in their annual AO100 List.

Fox News on PBT

When students living in Berkeley, Calif., crave a chicken burrito with an extra heaping of guacamole at High Tech Burrito, a Bay Area-based fast-food chain, they need to remember to bring only two things — an empty stomach and a forefinger. It gives new meaning to "finger food."

That's because even when they leave their wallets in their other pair of pants, they can pay up by simply using their fingers. High Tech Burrito is one of 2,100 stores in 44 states that are or have been clients of Pay By Touch, a company that lets customers use biometric identification — body-based measurements unique to each person — instead of cash or a credit card to pay their bills.

For Pay By Touch and its clients and customers, biometrics is the cutting edge of convenience and consumer technology. For critics, biometrics straddles the line between privacy rights and identity security on one side and the selling-out of personal data on the other.

"Paying by card is antiquated," Pay By Touch COO John Morris said from the company's headquarters in San Francisco. "It's a constant from a long time ago. People love [biometrics], people love the convenience — it's like a free service that speeds them through the line. They like the security of it.

"If you hand a paper check to a stranger, seven or eight humans touch that check before it gets into your account, and see your personal data," he added. "With biometrics, you're uniquely you. Why carry a purse in a dark parking lot when I can lock it in the trunk and pay by finger?"

People who enroll in Pay By Touch have two fingerprints — usually those of both forefingers — scanned into a computer that records the patterns of ridges, swirls and whorls that make each person's print unique.

The fingerprint information is stored in a top-security IBM data center. To prevent a data leak, Pay By Touch hires "ethical hackers" to try to break in to the system.

It's got a relatively small staff of 700, but Pay By Touch spends a good portion of its budget, "million of dollars," on data security, according to Morris.

"We won't sell it to anybody, we won't provide it to anybody, and it's a system we started designing ourselves from scratch," he said. "We had input from the Bank of America, from IBM, from Accenture, from the FBI — all of whom have built incredibly secure systems, and it's stored in a fortress that IBM runs for us. It's as secure as anything in the industry."

At each point of purchase, a computer scanner reads the customer's finger, allowing for countless environmental factors that make each reading slightly different from the next.

"If you're holding something in your right arm, like a child, you can use your left hand," Morris said. "Or if you have a Band-Aid on your finger, or if you have a cut, depending on how wide the cut is, the technology would still be able to read your unique print, even if you had a blemish or a scrape on your finger."

For those curious readers who are morbidly inclined, it might be reassuring to note that the scanners take into account the level of moisture on a person's skin. In other words, dead fingers won't work.

Even Pay By Touch's critics concede that using fingerprints, instead of other biometric readings, was a wise choice.

Retinal scans, which examine the pattern of blood vessels inside the eye, have largely proven not to be very useful, say biometrics experts. Face scans, voice prints and hand telemetry have all had varying levels of success, but none to the level that fingerprint scans have.

Iris scans, which memorize the colored part of each person's eye, look promising, but that field hasn't been explored enough yet to base an industry on.

Fingerprint scanning has so far proven the most accurate. That's been enough for the stores and customers who tout Pay By Touch's convenience, reliability and security.

Since High Tech Burrito enrolled with Pay By Touch in 2002 as one of its first retail clients, more than 2,000 other retailers have joined up, and 2.4 million shoppers have given Pay By Touch "the finger," as it were.

The number of Pay By Touch consumer users expands by tens of thousands each month, Morris said. He added that the service has also proven surprising popular with people on welfare, who no longer have to whip out an embarrassingly noticeable card to pay for their groceries.

Pay By Touch is also trying to expand into new marketplaces. One potential client is an association of physicians in a "mid- to large-sized" city, according to Morris. Pay By Touch would allow the patients to register basic medical information — such as allergies, medical history, family histories of heart disease, and so on — in the company's database so that it would be in a "digital wallet" instead of in, as Morris put it, "a manila folder where who knows who can see it?"

They are also expanding globally, with installations in the UK, and trials in France and South America.