TODAY it is “chip and PIN”. Soon it will be “chip and sing”. Britain’s banks are developing a system of credit card security that uses the voice’s tonal range. Rather than needing to recall a PIN, you will need to remember a line of a song.

Fraud has fallen since chip and PIN became compulsory, but customers struggle to remember their numbers. Ellis Bastan, chief technical spokesman of the British Banking Federation, said: “High street transactions have been suffering, so we have been looking at alternative methods of identity verification. Optical scans are too fallible, and standard voice recognition too easy to mimic electronically. But no two people sing the same way.”

Tills and cash dispensers are to have microphones. However, Mr Bastan adds, “if people struggle to recall a PIN, there is every chance they will also forget which song they are meant to sing. You might get some poor old dear belting out My Way in her local Co-op, when she is supposed to be doing The Hallelujah Chorus. That wouldn’t do at all. There has to be one universal song, for everybody.”

The search for one continues. Technicians developed the system using Parry’s Jerusalem, but dropped it to mollify Scottish and Welsh nationalists.

The new technology will be equally secure over the telephone or, where computers are fitted with a microphone, over the internet.

The Lyrical Input Elocution System looks set to be commonplace by April 1, 2009.

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