Germany contracts upgrade and maintenance of federal biometrics system

Germany’s central government has contracted one or more biometrics providers to update and maintain the National Biometric Matching Service (NBMS) 2.0.

Three tenders or requests to participate in the 13-month, 383,685.75 euros (approximately US$399,000) contract were received. Neither those submitting tenders or those chosen have been publicly revealed. The contract was awarded based on criteria that equally valued the quality and price of the services offered.

The NBMS is an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) operated by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) under Project 433.  Java-based software provides image quality assessment, biometric verification and identification. Clients submit requests via REST.

NBMS operates as a backend system, the contract award notice says, but also includes interfaces for test, administer and evaluate the biometric algorithms.

“The present sub-project is particularly about bug fixing, improvements and optimizations of the NBMS,” the document states.

Germany has been debating the appropriate use and limits on use of facial recognition by police in the context of the European Union’s AI Act. While the NBMS is a retrospective facial recognition system, law enforcement in the country has toyed with deploying live facial recognition, which is only allowed under the Act in specific circumstances.

Article Topics

ABIS  |  biometric identification  |  biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  Germany  |  tender