Most of the research on vein biometrics addresses the problems of either palm or finger vein recognition with a considerably smaller emphasis on wrist vein modality. This paper paves the way to a better understanding of capabilities and challenges in the field of wrist vein verification. This is achieved by introducing and discussing a fully automatic cross-correlation based wrist vein verification technique. Overcoming the limitations of ordinary cross-correlation, the proposed system is capable of compensating for scale, translation and rotation between vein patterns in a computationally efficient way. Introduced comparison algorithm requires only two cross-correlation operations to compensate for both translation and rotation, moreover the well known property of log-polar transformation of Fourier magnitudes is not involved in any form. To emphasize the veins, a two-layer Hessian-based vein enhancement approach with adaptive brightness normalization is introduced, improving the connectivity and the stability of extracted vein patterns. The experiments on the publicly available PUT Vein wrist database give promising results with FNMR of 3.75% for FMR of 0.1%. In addition we make this research reproducible providing the source code and instructions to replicate all findings in this work.