NEXT Biometrics earns biometric smart card volume order

During a presentation introducing the company’s new flexible fingerprint sensors for smart cards, Tore Etholm-Idsøe, CEO of NEXT Biometrics Group, reported that “NEXT Biometrics ASA has received the industry’s first biometric smart card volume order.”

“We have previously announced that we will not comment further on our smart card developments until we have something material to prove,” Etholm-Idsøe said. “We are now proud to announce that our ISO-compliance includes the recently published ISO/IEC 17839 standard, and to our knowledge this makes us the only supplier to meet this specification. The initial order has a value of 12 million Norwegian Krone (NOK) and shipments are scheduled to start in the third quarter of 2016. The first shipments will consist of rigid sensors. Volumes to our undisclosed customer are expected to increase to a total of 650,000 units in 2017.”

The CEO added, “We have always believed that the Active Thermal principle, patented by NEXT, is optimally positioned to produce a flexible sensor, which has the required size to be secure and convenient for almost 100 per cent of the population.”

Etholm-Idsøe emphasized, “We are now in the process of setting up production lines capable of delivering tens of millions of sensors at an acceptable yield. This includes some risk and is targeted to be completed in the first half of 2017.”

The company highlighted significant progress in smart card related research for its fingerprint sensors in its 2015 year-end report. “Throughout 2015, NEXT and its partners realized several key smart card related development milestones regarding using NEXT fingerprint sensors for this important market,” said Etholm-Idsoe. “During this period and continuing into 2016 NEXT has focused large parts of the R&D resources to smart card activities, and NEXT sees significant opportunities within several of the major volume smart card market segments – a market that currently is estimated to grow to several hundreds of millions units per annum.”

NEXT CEO Tore Etholm-Idsøe said: “Our (undisclosed) customer has done an impressive job in bringing out this product, as the first of its kind, and it has a high profile end customer waiting to take contracted deliveries. We are very proud to say this is the world´s first mass production order for fingerprint sensors on smart cards.”

He added, “For NEXT this is an important milestone as it demonstrates our leading position within the smart card market. As far as we know, no other company has yet managed to meet all mandatory ISO standard requirements. NEXT and a growing number of key industry players now seem to agree that NEXT technology is uniquely positioned for success in the smart card space. Being able to meet both the ISO and the real life mass market minimum requirements of sensor size is recognized as key to success in the quality critical smart card applications.”

The company will announce its quarterly report for Q1 2016 on May 24, 2016.

Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometrics  |  fingerprint sensors  |  fingerprint technology  |  Next Biometrics  |  research and development