Biometrics Fights College Retail Fraud While Improving Store Operations

Fingerprint and facial recognition technologies improve customer experience, enhance security, increase store productivity, and more.
Published: February 3, 2025

Campus shopping options ranging from apparel and convenience stores to eateries and bookstores share many of the same needs as any retail operation. These include fraud protection, efficient operation, and providing a high-quality experience to customers. Like most retailers, campus stores need to solve four key challenges:

  1. Optimizing the customer journey
  2. Reducing inventory and revenue shrinkage
  3. Enhancing access control and security; and
  4. Increasing store efficiency and productivity.

Biometric solutions help deliver these capabilities through innovations in fingerprint or facial recognition technologies. These solutions are poised to play a growing role in raising the quality of daily campus life. They will also improve retail efficiency and profitability by streamlining processes, curtailing employee theft, and virtually eliminating credit card and identity fraud at the point of sale (PoS).

Biometrics Foster Better Campus Experiences for Students

While the National Association of College Stores (NACS) says there is no official count of how many campus retail operations there are in the U.S., the organization estimates there are nearly 4,000 serving the collegiate retail market. Those on campus, according to the NACS, are often institutionally owned and operated, but they may also be operated under lease contract, or as cooperatives or by student associations.

Regardless of its operational model, each of these stores has an impact on the campus experience. When fingerprint or facial recognition technologies become part of this experience, it can help turn college stores into popular campus retail destinations and even contribute to an incoming student’s decision to apply.

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Both fingerprint scanners and facial recognition technology can easily integrate into kiosks and other self-checkout terminals at locations, such as campus convenience stores. This facilitates frictionless self-checkout and biometric payment. With fingerprint scanners, for example, customers authenticate their payment at checkout by pressing a finger on the reader. There is no need for cash, cards, a mobile app or other digital devices. Nor does the customer need to provide proof of age. Shoppers enjoy shorter lines and secure transactions, while retailers also benefit through increased productivity and reduced theft and labor costs.

Retailers Also Experience Biometrics’ Benefits

The same biometric self-checkout and payment processes that improve the customer shopping experience also benefit the retailer.

As an example, biometric authentication helps campus stores reduce employee theft that, on a larger scale among U.S. retailers, costs an estimated $50 billion annually according to Embroker.

Related Article: Missouri State Bookstore Manager Admits Embezzling $1M

One form of theft is when employees steal time by clocking in on behalf of another employee, also known as “buddy punching.” Biometric technology such as fingerprint readers is a popular choice for solving these time-and-attendance challenges that can significantly impact productivity and profitability. A fingerprint is a unique biometric marker that provides irrefutable proof of an employee’s presence when clocking in and out. This reduces payroll fraud while enabling the accurate recordkeeping necessary for compliance with regional wage and labor laws.

Biometric solutions like fingerprint readers can also increase POS security. The benefits of these biometric POS terminals include single-drawer accountability, with each transaction tying back to an employee’s fingerprint. This prevents internal theft and unauthorized transactions, while also making logins fast and easy —  there are no cards to fumble with or passwords to remember. This approach also eliminates the need to manage, reset or replace lost cards or forgotten passwords and PINs.

Another way to leverage biometric technology is to incorporate it into single sign-on (SSO) procedures to improve employee productivity while strengthening security. Many retailers have a collection of applications and systems used by their employees that require frequent log in during their shift. Biometric SSO simplifies this process, enabling retail employees to sign on to various applications, systems and places just once with a single set of credentials — their finger or face. Reducing the number of log-ins also substantially improves enterprise security, in addition to eliminating the inconvenience and inefficiencies of juggling passwords, PINs or access cards.

Solutions Deliver Results in Major Global Retail Deployments

The benefits of biometric solutions in the retail environment have been proven in large retail chains with hundreds of locations and tens of thousands of employees.

Related Article: Are Keycards Still Sufficient to Protect Your Campus?

In one example, a retailer with 250 stores spanning half a dozen countries has used fingerprint technology to eliminate the problem of floor supervisors misusing PoS terminals.

Before the adoption of fingerprint scanning technology, switching to a smart card-based authentication solution was insufficient. Supervisors often left their smart cards with cashiers to use in their absence or failed to return them after leaving the company. They often used them fraudulently, as well — once a sale was completed and the customer had left the store with their purchased items, the smart card could be used to improperly access the system so the cashier could void the transaction and pocket the “refund,” resulting in both monetary and inventory losses.

By moving to biometric-based authentication using a fingerprint reader, the retailer’s floor supervisors could now simply place their finger on the reader window to rapidly capture and encrypt the fingerprint image. A red flash visually indicated that it was properly captured. The image was then sent to the biometric engine for verification. Once the user was authenticated, access to the POS terminal was granted.

Since deployment, the system has also driven tangible improvements in the attendance and punctuality of floor supervisors, who must now be physically present in the store for authentication to take place. It also improved their accountability, which resulted in immediate cessation of PoS fraud.

Benefits like these are also available to the college campus retailer. Today’s fingerprint and face biometric solutions can transform the campus store into a high-value shopping destination where there are short lines and easy self-checkout and payment authentication. These solutions also improve store operations by reducing inventory and revenue shrinkage, enhancing access control and security, and increasing efficiency and productivity.


Vito Fabbrizio is HID’s Managing Director, Biometrics, Extended Access Technologies. He can be reached at  [email protected].

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