The falling costs of electronic fingerprinting make it a promising tool for cash payments of wealth from extracted resources. Photo: Dave Bleasdale (flickr)

Spy movies turn voices into passports, retinas into passwords. And modern fingerprint readers might be on the verge of helping developing nations turn oil revenues into cash transfers.

That's what Alan Gelb and Caroline Decker argue in a compelling round of research published this summer by the Center for Global Development. When people enroll in a cash payment program, their fingerprints or irises are scanned electronically; these are then used for identification before each future cash withdrawal.

It's called biometrics, and Gelb and Decker say it's a great way to fight fraud:

Evidence suggests that even well designed transfer programs experience 10-20 percent leakage, if not higher…We estimate that in a typical cash transfer program, savings from biometrics can cover initial costs in only 15 months and save an additional $60 million after five years. This is in addition to providing an auditable trail of the entire program and facilitating more efficient payment mechanisms.

Gelb and Decker also persuasively argue that biometrics can be great for voting and banking records, too. But they're especially interesting as a way for resource-rich countries to divvy up the revenues from their natural wealth. The researchers estimate, for example, that Libya's pre-war oil exports added up to an annual windfall of $6,250 for each of 6.4 million citizens.

Find a way to put most of that cash in the hands of residents, perhaps by way of a national trust fund, and you'd have some very nice working capital for up to 6.4 million business ventures or school tuitions.

There are two reasons resource-extraction cash transfers are a particularly promising application for biometrics:

Ongoing payments: The 15-month payoff period for biometric systems makes them ideal for large-scale programs that maintain long-term relationships with cash recipients. Resource extraction is a years-long process.

Decentralized wealth: Resource-rich nations have been dogged by what Gelb and Decker call "governance problems associated with the concentration of large rents in the hands of the state." By creating an efficient channel to spread that wealth to individuals, biometrics could make make it harder for future autocrats to consolidate power.

Even James Bond might be impressed by that.