Biometrics companies donate, offer services to support COVID-19 relief efforts

BIO-key is donating to the American Red Cross a part of its 2020 earnings from selling its compact biometric fingerprint scanners, to help the organization fight COVID-19, the company announced.

“We are living in a different world today, and the transition has been sudden and unexpected,” stated Mike DePasquale, Chairman and CEO, BIO-key, in a prepared statement. “The new landscape presents a unique opportunity for both our software and hardware biometric fingerprint authentication solutions. We want to make sure organizations understand how our solutions can help them during this critical period, and at the same time, we wanted to take action to support those whose lives are being impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. BIO-key is proud to contribute to the efforts of the Red Cross to provide aid to those in need.”

EcoID, SidePass, and SideSwipe are available through a number of retail companies and resellers such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, Dell, Ingram Micro and others. The scanners support remote authentication and address security issues in a remote work environment such as phishing and false time tracking reports. Adding a biometric authentication factor as an additional security layer improves workflow and ensures security compliance.

Onfido coronavirus relief effort

Onfido will be providing free identity verification to organizations involved in the coronavirus relief efforts, announced Husayn Kassai, Onfido CEO and co-founder, in a blog post.

For the next six months, non-profits and charity organizations directly involved in fighting COVID-19 will benefit from its fully-automated document and selfie service.

The company is involved in projects related to volunteer onboarding and providing government certification for people who have already been tested so they can return to work. Not-for-profit or charity organizations in healthcare, home service, education, or otherwise directly working on pandemic relief can apply for free services through Onfido’s website.

Onfido reports 345 percent weekly increase in usage in online healthcare and pharmacies where consultations moved online, and a 37 percent increase in usage of online remittance platforms.

Onfido and GetID were recently chosen to provide biometric identity verification for online financial trading company Admiral Markets.

Article Topics

BIO-key  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fingerprint scanners  |  identity verification  |  Onfido