Biometrics ride physical and digital credentials market growth

Biometrics play a key role in linking physical and digital credentials, and that intersection is the theme running through most of the week’s top stories on Biometric Update. Idex Biometrics’ new CEO makes the case for fingerprints as the next big think in payment cards, while Mastercard is offering to verify payment cardholders’ identity and attribute data. Toppan Gravity is acquiring HID Citizen Identity, creating an ID document issuance behemoth, and the FIDO Alliance convened a deep field of digital identity decision-makers to share the latest and next developments in passkeys at Authenticate 2024. Meanwhile, an innovative biometric bias test by BixeLab is good news for New Zealand’s public services and the industry in general.

Top biometrics news of the week

Toppan Gravity is acquiring HID Citizen Identity from Assa Abloy for an unknown price, and will take over control of the division within months. Biometric Update broke the news on Thursday and more details were released Friday that states HID CID made 1.3 billion Swedish kronor (US$120 million) in revenues in 2023.

Border crossing operators and international travel companies in Europe are voicing a mix of relief and frustration with the latest delay in the EU’s biometric EES. The pushback into 2025 avoids exacerbating gridlock in Dover, and Eurostar is pushing for a phased implementation, which might allow for a remote biometrics enrollment step, or even reduced biometrics requirements.

There are more than 70 financial institutions in Uganda now performing KYC checks against the national biometric database, through a deal between NIRA and the country’s central bank. Ugandans must have a national ID card or digital ID number to open a bank account, and the move to ease ID verification is expected to improve financial inclusion. A similar deal in Somalia is also expected to help increase ID issuance.

A GAO audit of the U.S. Social Security Administration’s eCBSV service flags synthetic identities as a huge and growing fraud concern for financial institutions. FinCEN stats show hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, but probably reflect underreporting of the problem, since, as Experian notes, they are notoriously difficult to detect.

Biometric payment cards have not yet been adopted by consumers en masse, but Idex still sees them as a massive growth opportunity. CEO Catharina Eklof explains the testing her company puts cards through, both for durability and performance in an interview with Biometric Update, and discusses the growing market for biometric cards outside of payments.

Mastercard is rolling out a service to perform online identity and attribute verification based on the information the payment network already has about its cardholders. The new Identity Attribute Verification service is an implementation of the EMV 3-D Secure Attribute Verification Message Extension specification published earlier this year.

EU member nations are considering changes to the technical specifications of the EUDI Wallet which are in development. Even as the EDUI Wallet specifications may be changing, Lissi says a German prototype competition is moving into its second phase, and Italy is filling in the details of its rollout plans. The CEO of Criipto, cousin to Norway’s BankID, told an audience at Authenticate 2024 that EU regulators need to address phishing.

Biometric Update spotlighted the FIDO Alliance’s Authenticate conference in our coverage this week.

Technology standards and development are paving the way to everyday uses for mobile driver’s licenses. The international standard for using mDLs in online transactions has been published, and mDL readers for in-person transactions are coming. Mattr and Fast Enterprises each demonstrated readers with mDLs from the U.S. and Australia at the recent IVC24 Interop event.

People sometimes ask what’s holding police back from using facial recognition if it’s legal and it works. But the question presupposes several straightforward propositions to describe situations that are actually quite nuanced. Fraser Sampson delves into the details of police facial recognition use, particularly in the UK.

A novel test of the effectiveness of New Zealand’s facial recognition system on a sample representative of its population by BixeLab shows no significant bias. It is the first independent test by an accredited assessment body of the effectiveness of face biometrics on the skin tones of New Zealand’s indigenous ethnic groups, and sets up a further rollout of the system for government benefits issuance.

BixeLab also carried out a first-of-its-kind test of ZeroBiometrics’ template protection based on the ISO/IEC 30136 standard.

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Article Topics

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