So, having worked in this industry:

1) There are many much more insecure areas (card cloning comes to mind) which already have solutions ( http://www.magtek.com/V2/products/secure-card-reader-authenticators/bullet.asp ), and nearly 0 adoption. Why is everyone suddenly jumping on the fingerprint bandwagon?

2) There is no point in more physical security: The card issuers guarantee the safety of cardholders funds and merchants tend to be very touchy about missing funds (the traditional 30 day lag of AMEX *seriously* affects their market penetration, and there's a massive effort to do statistical fraud analysis at a high level, so truthfully a very basic security at the register is effective, because card fraud stays at a relatively fixed level (it could be even better but that would lead to more false positives and worsen the customer experience)), the cost of the round of hardware upgrades for the whole network far exceeds the cost of fraud.

3) What makes *sense* is to let consumers swipe their own cards so they can have card-present transactions from their own home, in conjunction to card profiling tech like the link above (it builds a 'fingerprint' of the iron filings suspended in your magswipe to preventing cloning).

4) This sounds like an attempt to me to reduce the number of card present transactions (which are much less expensive for the merchant) and make more money by claiming a larger percentage of the transaction and to fuel a round of upgrades at the register, much like when checks switched from magnetic ink to frontal scans (check21), which also had little to do with fraud and was mostly a internal cost reduction as well as eliminating some friction for depositors, but required widespread merchant upgrades(with those upgrades not helping the merchant at all).

5) I'm not sure how PIN security factors in here, since debit pins use an injectable encryption scheme that is performed *on* the pinpad which is injected onto it in a *tightly* controlled process. It is a completely different protocol (at least in the US).

6) There have been a number of transaction network breakins, and I for one (knowing some of the players in this space), would *never* want any kind of data on their servers that could not be reissued.

My personal experience is, if you have an idea you cannot complete yourself, it will be stolen. If the person you were working with needs to solve a problem, they will gravitate towards the best solutions they know, so theft of your best ideas is inevitable. Concentrate on being able to constantly reinventing ideas, and brainstorming new ones. If you try and hold on too tightly to your ideas, you're just dooming yourself to pain and disappointment.