It is hard to imagine what the paintings of French artist Henri Matisse could have in common with bank security solutions, but a recent technology demonstration I attended suggests there is a link.

In the depths of the Accenture Labs in Sophia Antipolis, a few miles southwest of the Musée Matisse in Nice, the systems integrator showed me its latest innovations in the field of identity and access management (IAM).

Some of the solutions looked like they had the potential to be very useful, but others left me feeling rather confused.

One, for instance, involved an application that uses video cameras to identify and track customers in a branch of the local bank and records their movements by sketching red lines across a virtual floor. The on-screen representation looked like a game of spot the ball mixed with something that Matisse might have painted on an off-day.

The commercial pitch is that the bank could analyse the footage to get a better idea of its customers’ behaviour, and from that somehow devise a way to improve how it sells them banking services.

But does being able to track someone walking around a branch really help a bank make more money? Does the fact that a customer fails to move around the branch as expected indicate that they find the layout confusing, or is it that he or she is just strolling over to the window to look for the next number 38 bus, or unwrapping a chocolate bar and putting the wrapper in the bin?

Accenture would argue that this is precisely the point: if customers have a tendency to wander to the window or bin, then maybe the bank’s service is too slow or inefficient to keep people’s attention.

I may be missing something, but surely there are simpler and cheaper methods of doing the same thing, like using an RFID counter to tot up the number of customers through the door and comparing it with the number of transactions completed.

Other demonstrations made more sense. For example, the MiSense biometric recognition system, which has been trialled at Heathrow with what appear to be favourable results, really does look as though it could reduce passenger journey times by speeding up the check-in process. That said, you’ll still have to wait in a long line to have your bag, laptop, and jacket X-rayed. And then join the queue for immigration.

MiSense should enable travellers to recoup a small amount of the extra time the British Airport Authority has added to the airport security process in recent years, but nowhere near enough to bring it back to pre-7/7 levels.