Biometrics business revs up with prospect of big deals and wider adoption

A biometrics tender, talks, an RFI and a production launch all setting up potential big money deals for providers in different areas of the market make up several of the top news stories of the week on Biometric Update. If IN Groupe’s negotiation to acquire Idemia Smart Identity is successful, it will surely be the biggest change in the biometrics vendor landscape of the year. Infineon and Fingerprint Cards are ready for volume sales of their joint biometric payment card, and Estonia’s e-residency program and the FBI are each engaging biometrics providers to upgrade their capabilities.

Top biometrics news of the week

Saudi Arabia’s digital identity platform, Absher, is at the core of the Kingdom’s digital transformation and financial inclusion efforts, and is gaining traction. The platform is handling millions of transactions each month, and 94 percent of Saudi’s now own digital wallets and bank accounts. The platform is also making services like license renewals more efficient through digital delivery.

The central bank of the Philippines is going to arbitration with ACI over the cancellation of a contract to produce the country’s national ID cards. The BSP says the company has delivered half of the cards and lost half of the contract’s total value to production issues, but ACI says it can still carry out its duties. PSA blames both parties for delays in card production.

Google has previewed digital IDs created with scans of U.S. passports and selfie biometric verification, which the tech giant calls “ID passes.” The digital IDs are stored in Google Wallet, which is also adding a range of capabilities like account recovery and identity verification to expand their applicable use cases.

What’s another two years, when you’ve already been waiting 19? The TSA has proposed a further delay to the REAL ID implementation deadline. More than half of driver’s licenses in the U.S. now comply with the standard, but the agency says it will take until May, 2027 to upgrade the rest.

Estonia is seeking a remote biometrics enrollment capability for its e-residency program. The government is running a tender over the next month to acquire software for collecting face and contactless fingerprint biometrics on mobile phones, and then issuing a digital ID that can meet eIDAS regulations.

The FBI is running an RFI to get a handle on the commercial market for software that collect images from the internet and run facial recognition searches against them, which is Clearview’s specialty. The agency wants to know if vendors can templatize the images before submitting them as biometric references, and to hear about their data management practices, by the middle of October.

The FBI’s Next Generation Identification turned 10 last weekend. Happy birthday to NGI, which the agency calls “the world’s largest and most efficient electronic repository of biometric and criminal information.”

Biometric payment cards under the SECORA Pay Bio developed by Infineon with fingerprint sensors from Fingerprint Cards are ready for mass production, which they also happen to make easier, the partners say. Awareness of and interest in biometric payment cards as a premium feature has reached its highest point yet, according to an Idemia survey.

IN Groupe began exclusive negotiations with Advent to acquire Idemia Smart Identity this week in a bid to create a new global giant in the production of ID documents, digital identities, and the biometric systems used with them. The smallest of Idemia Group’s three units contributed somewhere around €425 million in revenues last year.

Biometric authentication is improving the security and efficiency of services in Africa, but its use faces significant hurdles, observed presenters during a webinar in support of the Digital ID Hackathon for Africa. The hackathon was held by Upanzi Network and Microsave Consulting in partnership with MOSIP, and presenters discussed the value of open-source digital identity tools and iris recognition to identity systems on the continent.

Nigeria is planning to adopt digital travel credentials to work with the biometric gates it is deploying to the country’s airports. The introduction of DTCs could drive processing time for returning Nigerians down to 14 seconds, according to the Interior Minister, and aligns with efforts in countries across Africa to make air travel more efficient.

The EU’s AI Pact is a call to commit to implementing the core principles of the AI Act ahead of its coming regulatory impact, Corsight AI CPO Tony Porter explains in a guest post for Biometric Update. Porter emphasizes the importance of proactive commitment to transparency and risk management in fostering an environment of trust.

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Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  identity verification  |  week in review