Personal identification number
short, numeric passcode used to access certain services such as ATMs
A personal identification number (PIN; sometimes redundantly a PIN code or PIN number) is a numeric (sometimes alpha-numeric) passcode used in the process of authenticating a user accessing a system.
The PIN has been the key to facilitating the private data exchange between different data-processing centers in computer networks for financial institutions, governments, and enterprises. PINs may be used to authenticate banking systems with cardholders, governments with citizens, enterprises with employees, and computers with users, among other uses.
In common usage, PINs are used in ATM or POS transactions, secure access control (e.g. computer access, door access, car access), internet transactions, or to log into a restricted website.
History
The PIN originated with the introduction of the automated teller machine (ATM) in 1967, as an efficient way for banks to dispense cash to their customers. The first ATM system was that of Barclays in London, in 1967; it accepted cheques with machine-readable encoding, rather than cards, and matched the PIN to the cheque. In 1972, Lloyds Bank issued the first bank card to feature an information-encoding magnetic strip, using a PIN for security. James Goodfellow, the inventor who patented the first personal identification number, was awarded an OBE in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Mohamed M. Atalla invented the first PIN-based hardware security module (HSM), dubbed the "Atalla Box," a security system that encrypted PIN and ATM messages and protected offline devices with an un-guessable PIN-generating key.
The public source identifies “Personal identification number” as short, numeric passcode used to access certain services such as ATMs. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Personal, identification and number.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q674050. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1972 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Personal identification number” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.