HSBC did that. I could never understand that - the exact phrase was in the movie!

Someone probably did it for an internal demo, as a joke. Then people pushed it upwards, until someone clueless approved it.

Fidelity seemed to sign you up for this when you called them on the phone almost automatically. Ridiculous since it was defeated easily in a hacker movie from the 1990s using a tape recorder.

Much cleaner than keeping a finger on you to bypass the print reader.