American Fork, UT. - <br><br>International Automated Systems, Inc., announced that the company's pilot U-Check store in Salem, Utah, which opened officially to the general public in March 1999, has captured approximately 50 percent of the local grocery market and is running solidly "in the black."
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The U-Check store is the world's only fully self-cashiering supermarket.  It features 12 of IAS's patented automated check-out lanes.
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This is the store chain that offers its customers a biometrically secured debit card, called the "U-Check Card."  The U-Check card is a "magstripe" card containing personal banking data, cross-referenced to the individual's real-time three-dimensional fingerprint.
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Upon processing a transaction, by providing a positive identification and allocating funds to be credited to the supermarket's account, IAS's state-of-the-art three-dimensional fingerprint identification system assigns a unique fingerprint identification number that becomes embedded in the transaction information.  In so doing, the IAS system obviates the need for an employee to take a check and virtually eliminates credit/debit card fraud and charge backs, while preventing duplicate transaction postings.
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The U-Check card has been available for only four months, and already approximately 30% of the households in Salem utilize one.
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According to numbers available from the Food Marketing Institute, the average amount of U-Check's transactions (approximately $35.00) now exceeds the industry average by nearly 100 percent. IAS also expects to launch a time and attendance mechanism (personnel time clock) based on its AFIM (automatic fingerprint identification machine) technology during the first calendar quarter.