Biometrics starts 2025 with new and increasingly clear roles in the digital world

Biometrics were asked to do more than ever before in 2024, with some use cases, like age assurance, graduating to functional markets. The themes revisited throughout the year in Biometric Update’s coverage of the industry also reflect maturing digital identity ecosystems, across 3412 news reports including 60 longer features and 71 guest posts. Clarity has increased on how digital ID will work, in terms of the types of credentials that will be used (mDLs in the U.S.) and where they will be stored (national digital ID wallets in the EU), and how identity verification providers fit into national schemes (through Trust Frameworks in places like the UK and Australia). Interviews like those with leaders at Augentic, Idemia and PimEyes provided insight on key developments in national ID card issuance, airport biometrics contracts and biometric data privacy, respectively, which will continue to resonate in 2025.

Defining themes of 2024 in digital identity

The EU’s biometric entry-exit system (EES) was due to go live in October 6 this year, then November 10, and now over several phases in 2025. The year was filled with hand-wringing, deliberations and emergency measures like an exemption for British travelers at the UK border to prepare for the launch.

Digital government reform was a big theme of 2024, often overlapping with an international push in support for digital public infrastructure (DPI). One example is the progress of Saudi Arabia’s Absher platform, which includes digital identity and financial inclusion tools, has led to 94 percent of adults in the Kingdom possessing not just bank accounts but also digital wallets.

Trust frameworks for digital identity were also prominent in the news this year, with the UK’s new government introducing two new pieces of legislation to implement the DIATF and Australia clarifying its modest ambition for the number of accreditations under the TDIF as the country’s national digital ID system rolls out.

Mobile driver’s licenses advanced significantly in several countries around the world in 2024, notably including the U.S. and Australia. Thales Head of Federal Government Sales Neville Pattinson explained the path through trials to production rollouts in a guest post at the beginning of the year. Thales Strategic Marketing Director Digital Identity John Cullen enumerated the benefits of mDLs and framed them as “an inevitable step forward” in a digitizing world. The advances in trials and standardization over the year support Cullen’s contention, and set up another round of mDLs in 2025.

KuppingerCole’s European Identity and Cloud (EIC 2024) conference focused on decentralized digital ID and digital wallets, two more trends dramatically reshaping the industry over the past year. EUDI Wallet development appears to be progressing more smoothly than the new border control system, with the formal adoption of technical standards by the EC, prototype competitions and early versions launching in several countries.

Several countries issued contracts for national ID cards in 2024, including a 15-year deal for Augentic in Cameroon. Augentic CEO Labinot Carreti told Biometric Update how the Build-Operate-Transfer contract came about, and how the two-phase ID card project is expected to unfold.

Biometric Update’s on-location coverage of MOSIP Connect in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia included an interview with an official from Sierra Leone’s NCRA on the country’s successful MOSIP pilot and the rollout of its new ID cards. Also among highlights from the event was a presentation in which officials from Morocco and the Philippines discussed the significantly different ways their countries are using MOSIP.

Ethiopia is also hosting ID4Africa 2025, as announced at the movement’s 2024 AGM in Cape Town, South Africa. Our on-location coverage of ID4Africa 2024 took in the presentations, announcements, insider perspectives and planning shared during the milestone conference.

Airport biometrics also continued their steady rollout around the world in 2024. But as adoption of the technology ticks up in places with legacies of troubled tenders, separating facts from allegations becomes more challenging. Biometric Update spoke to Idemia by phone and email on multiple occasions to clarify points details of a canceled contract and legal dispute with a former partner on South Africa’s biometric passenger processing system.

Even in the U.S., TSA continues to face congressional opposition to its congressional mandate to implement face biometrics for international travelers, whether through diverted funding or calls for investigations. Despite that, the agency says it intends to reach 400 airports across America over the coming years.

A new standard for biometric passports from ICAO is coming in 2025, and preparations to adopt it included a two-day workshop held by the EAB. The presentations delved into the ISO/IEC biometrics standards ICAO uses as a basis for the passport standard, with presentations from some of the most prominent voices in the field, and the new, more flexible system for encoding biometric data.

The EAB’s ongoing lunch talk series also highlighted another of the year’s top trends in biometrics and digital identity: the threat of deepfakes and generative AI, including morphing attacks on passport and border control systems.

Among the most insightful presentations from Biometric Update’s on-location coverage of Identity Week 2024 were panels on biometrics innovation with representatives from the FBI, Craefte, CITER and Iris ID, and then DHS, ROC, Oak Ridge National Lab, Biometrics Guru and SAIC’s Maryland test Facility. The technologies in development discussed included mobile iris scanning, algorithmic explainability and tasks adjacent to facial recognition, like image quality assessment, PAD and face detection.

The FIDO Alliance’s Authenticate 2024 conference reviewed significant gains not just in remote authentication through passkeys, which were a major trend over the past year, but also remote identity proofing, which has reached the point where Amazon is ready to take the leap of accepting digital identities.

The risks that effective facial recognition systems can pose to people’s privacy was highlighted by the integration of a pair of online biometric services with Meta’s smart glasses by a couple of Ivy League students. PimEyes Director Giorgi Gobronidze responded to Biometric Update in an interview that the students’ demonstration of potential biometrics risks also showed malicious actors how to weaponize the technology.

Toppan Gravity’s acquisition of HID’s Citizen Identity division in October appears to be the largest M&A agreement reached during 2024, and represents a year in which deals were large, if not as plentiful as in some recent years. Even bigger than Amadeus acquisition of Vision-Box, Entrust’s purchase of Onfido, IN Groupe picking up MitID and LexisNexis’ addition of IDVerse is the exclusive negotiating window for IN Groupe to buy Idemia Smart Identity.

The first-ever Global Age Assurance Standards Summit served notice of the maturity of age verification and facial age estimation technology, and the age assurance ecosystem more generally. NIST testing suggests biometric age estimation is reaching the same level of effectiveness as checking an ID document, and just in time, with legislators and regulators around the world moving to impose meaningful age checks on a range of services from online pornography and social media to gambling.

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Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  week in review