British company Facebanx has unveiled its online facial recognition technology that it claims will reduce fraud and identity theft for organisations operating on the 'net.

It provides an extra step of security that banks, insurance companies and pretty much anybody who accepts payments online can add to their existing online presence, ensuring that those signing up for their services are not doing so fraudulently. It also makes sure that the customer who is using a service is the one who originally signed up.

The Facebanx system asks a customer to take a picture of their face using a webcam, smartphone or tablet device with a camera when they sign up for a new bank account, insurance plan, online wallet or other sensitive service. This face is then registered in the facebanx database so that the same face can't be assigned to a different account, or a different face used to access the original account.

Face capture is taken from a live video recording, which uses all manner of detail in the recording to ensure that it's not just a still image being held up to the camera.

"Our product has been specifically designed to combat fraud and provides a unique solution for processors to share data to combat multiple acts of fraud," said Matthew Silverstone, CEO of Facebanx. "We are currently in discussions with a number of processing companies, banks and merchants about adding our software to their CRM.”

So in the near future you could be asked to smile for the camera when paying for your eBay items. We're not entirely sure, though, how companies will get around the fact that not everybody owns a webcam.