Japanese bank taps NEC for document security using RFID

IDG News Service - TOKYO -- NEC Corp. has signed a contract with a Japanese bank for an RFID-based document management system, the company said yesterday.
The system, which NEC claims is the world's first to use radio frequency identification for this function, will be introduced by Bank of Nagoya Ltd. in April 2005, NEC said. Bank of Nagoya is a regional bank in central Japan. Financial details of the agreement weren't disclosed.
The system, which is still under development, will use omnidirectional antennas attached to bookshelves and filing cabinets. They will communicate data from RFID tags embedded in documents to a software system that offers real-time document tracking, according to Motofumi Yamamuro, an NEC spokesperson. NEC is co-developing the system with Nikko Telecommunications Co., a computer systems sales company.
Yamamuro said the system, which NEC is targeting at banks, financial institutions, libraries, hospitals and other organizations that store sensitive documents, is designed to be combined with other security systems to provide comprehensive and detailed document protection. When combined with employee identification systems using cards or fingerprint sensors or tags, the RFID system could help enable real-time recording of which employees are removing or replacing which documents from a filing cabinet or room.
"We see this system working on top of, or in combination with, a number of other systems to provide high-security document protection. Say, for example, a person manages to take a document that he or she is not authorized to access. The system could sound an alert to warn a security systems person of this," Yamamuro said.
In a March 2004 survey of 450 wireless developers, Evans Data Corp., a U.S.-based market research company, reported that RFID security and access-control applications are the RFID technologies that companies are most likely to deploy over the next two years. Evans predicted that the global market for RFID-based security and access-control applications could grow 450% over the next 12 months and a further 95% in 2006.
NEC also claims that the system will aid workflow management and inventory. For example, in a case study conducted for the Bank of Nagoya that assumed that the system used 100,000 tags, NEC calculated that the bank would save about $54,000 per year for inventory checks, compared with having staff manually conduct the process using bar codes and readers. Yamamuro said NEC wouldn't disclose the total cost of conducting the inventory process using staff and bar code readers for confidentiality reasons.

"But we can say that the major cost reduction came from reduction in personnel time and costs,"