Biometrics for the blind, banking and border control hit big this week

Here’s a recap of most popular biometrics industry news that appeared on BiometricUpdate.com this past week.

Voice and face

In this week’s voice and face recognition news, payments start-up SayPay Technologies, Inc. partnered with VoiceVault, Inc. to integrate SayPay’s single, seamless solution for bill payments, online checkout, and website sign-in into VoiceVault’s ViGo voice authentication product.

Continuing with voice biometrics news, Sensory Inc. released TrulyNatural, a client-based large vocabulary speech recognition platform that offers high accuracy, along with a more consistent and secure user experience.

And in a particularly intriguing development, ICT students from Birmingham City University developed a new smart cane that uses facial recognition technology to enable the visually impaired to automatically identify their friends and family up to 10 meters away.

Fingerprint News

This week in fingerprint news, Fingerprint Cards (FPC) introduced two new touch fingerprint sensors, FPC1022 and FPC1035, which are the company’s smallest touch fingerprint sensors to date.

In what seems like a neverending series of updates from the popular fingerprint developer, Precise Biometrics recently received an additional order of 1,200 Tactivo smartcard readers from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) within the US Department of Defense.

In other Precise Biometrics news, the company signed a license agreement with Chinese fingerprint sensor manufacturer Silead to include Precise Biometrics´ fingerprint software, Precise BioMatch Mobile into its products portfolio.

Notable fingerprint player Next Biometrics found its fingerprint technology the focus of a recent Microsoft event addressing secure authentication initiatives in Windows, in which Microsoft management recognized Next Biometrics as one of the world’s two leading fingerprint sensor suppliers.

Finally, SecuGen Corporation released the U20-WR, a water resistant optical fingerprint sensor that is FAP 20 Mobile ID and PIV certified.

Border Protection

This past week saw two major developments in ongoing stories regarding border protection, starting with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announcement that it will update personal information categories in the Border Crossing Information (BCI) System of Records to include the capture of various biometric data including digital fingerprints, photographs and iris scans at the border.

Switching to overseas, the Australian government has allocated a total of AU$450 million to increase national security to provide different agencies with more funding, including AU$296 million toward boosting the technological capabilities of the nation’s intelligence-gathering agencies.

Biometrics in banking

This past week saw two prominent reports regarding biometrics in the banking sector, starting with financial institutions First Internet Bank and Investec making separate announcements that they have both integrated Touch ID functionality in their respective mobile banking applications, replacing traditional login credentials such a username or password.

And in a special guest post, Steve Cook, director of business development at Facebanx, discussed how banking in the future is being significantly altered for the better by replacing traditional passwords with biometric authentication.

Other news

In other biometric-related news, last month, four patent infringement lawsuits filed by Blue Spike against MorphoTrust USA and other Safran subsidiaries and even their customers were dismissed with prejudice by the Court of Federal Claims.

In a significant funding round, FST Biometrics received a $15 million investment from GMF Capital, and as part of this agreement, GMF Capital appointed former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as its representative on the FST Biometrics board.

Finally, Tractica recently published a new report entitled “Biometrics Market Forecasts” that estimates that the global biometrics market will see a total, cumulative revenue of $67.8 billion over the next 10-year period.

Article Topics

Australia  |  biometric database  |  biometrics  |  CBP  |  Fingerprint Cards  |  fingerprint sensors  |  FST Biometrics  |  MorphoTrust  |  Next Biometrics  |  Precise Biometrics  |  SecuGen  |  Sensory  |  Touch ID  |  Tractica  |  VoiceVault