Fingerprint Cards partners for biometric payment cards in India, 2021 results released

Fingerprint Cards collaborates with Transcorp and Mswipe to bring contactless biometric payment cards to India and published its financial results for 2021 and future outlook that anticipates success with diversification and the biometric payment card market despite a rocky road ahead from semiconductor shortages. The company’s expectations for growth mirrors the findings of Vantage Market Research, which predicts the fingerprint sensor market to reach almost $6 billion by 2028.
Two partnerships to develop biometric payment cards for Indian market
Fingerprint Cards and Transcorp, an Indian financial services company, say they will collaborate to bring biometric payment cards to customers across India.
“We are pleased to collaborate with Transcorp, to bring state of the art contactless biometric cards to Transcorp’s customers,” says Michel Roig, president of Payments & Access at Fingerprint Cards. “This collaboration will bring consumers in India a more secure, fast, and convenient payment experience. We see huge potential in India and the APAC region since contactless payment transactions have been increasing year on year.”
The two companies are targeting 940 million active card holders in India and will use Fingerprint Cards’ T-Shape module for integration in biometric payment cards using standard automated manufacturing processes.
The spate of business deals with Indian financial companies continued for Fingerprint Cards through a collaboration with Mswipe to bring contactless biometric payment cards to India’s fintech industry.
Mswipe is described as an end-to-end digital enabler for small-medium enterprises and the largest independent mobile point-of-sale merchant acquirer and network provider. The deal will have Fingerprint Cards’ contactless biometric payment debit and credit cards brought to India with the aim to target 100,000 existing customers. The cards will feature Fingerprint Cards’ T-Shape module and software platform.
Manish Patel, founder and CEO of Mswipe, says Fingerprint Cards’ biometric payment cards were selected for their performance and low power consumption. Patel also says it will offer great benefits for merchants and consumers with the quick growth of contactless payments in India.
“With the wide partner portfolio secured by Mswipe, we truly believe adding biometric solutions to their product range will add convenience and easy payments for merchants and consumers in the region,” Roig says. “Contactless and digital payments are growing fast in India, as consumers are choosing touch-free, safe and seamless ways to pay.”
Fingerprint Cards is not new to the Indian market, with it announcing a collaboration with Indian smartcard manufacturer M-Tech in 2020 and an agreement with Excelpoint Systems for distribution in India.
Growth with diversification marked in 2021 fiscal results
Fingerprint Cards reaped the rewards of a diversification strategy that showed improvements with its profitability in a summary of its 2021 financial results, as the Swedish biometrics company also mentioned its adaptation to a global semiconductor shortage.
President and CEO Christian Fredrikson made note of the strategy in an address within a 2021 annual report that includes its finances for the year. He abridged the company’s successes in 2021 to diversify into biometric PC solutions with fingerprint sensors on laptops, a focus on biometric access control security cards, and growth into the biometric payment card market.
In 2021, the company reached a four-year-high on profitability with SEK 396.9 million (approximately US$40.1 million), a 29.3 percent gross margin. Its operating margin also stood at -0.6 percent, the highest since 2017, which was the financial peak for the company on revenues, gross profit, operating result, and EBITDA in the past five years. Its 2021 revenue stood at SEK 1.36 billion (approximately $137 million), above its 2020 result but below 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Fredrikson says that while semiconductor shortages will impact Fingerprint Cards in 2022, the company is working to improve access with large manufacturers, module suppliers and existing providers, while building new connections with new suppliers.
The CEO anticipates “continued favorable revenue growth” with its previous forecast of SEK 1.6 billion to 2 billion for the 2022 fiscal year. The revenue prediction is identical to one made in its interim report for the first quarter of 2022 that expects a rocky road ahead from COVID-19 lockdowns in China that jammed supply chains and demand for smartphones.
Global fingerprint sensor market to almost double from 2021 to 2028
Vantage Market Research suggests that the global fingerprint sensor market will balloon from US$3.21 billion in 2021 to $5.92 billion in 2028, driven by demand from smartphones, governments and law enforcement agencies, and time and attendance solutions from employers.
In a market report, Vantage finds a push from governments to digitalize their services for security purposes that also forces demand for the biometric in smartphones, tablets, PCs, notebooks, and wearable devices. It also expects increased adoption of biometric-based time and attendance systems in corporations and governments for measuring employee hours of service and productivity.
These influences plus the transition to fingerprint biometrics for more payments will lead to a compound annual growth rate of 10.7 percent over the forecast period from 2022 to 2028, the report says.
The Asia-Pacific region is believed to be the largest driver of demand, with the mass use of wearable devices, security and safety concerns, smartphone sales in China, and increases in mobile transactions in China and India. Even with the COVID-19 pandemic enforcing lockdown measures and economic headwinds that rocked supply chains, the report believes that the supply problems will improve in the second half of 2022.
It forecasts the consumer electronics application to account for the greatest revenue of the market for fingerprint sensors; consumer IoT devices to present market opportunities during the forecast period; and the banking and finance sector to be the fastest-growing application throughout the projection period due to the increasing deployment of fingerprint sensors in smart cards used for payments.
Similar market research from Imarc says that the biometric fingerprint sensor market will reach $8.5 billion in 2026.
Article Topics
biometric cards | biometric payments | biometrics | Fingerprint Cards | fingerprint sensors | India | market report | stocks
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