Biometrics opportunities knocking, but not everyone is at the right door

There is clearly money to made in biometrics to support government services and payments, but also plenty of risk, especially without the right market fit. Biometric payment card revenue never came through for Zwipe, but J.P. Morgan has revealed its intention to wade into biometric payments in a big way. Clearview has changed CEOs to chase federal government contracts, just as governments in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil and the UK set the conditions for opportunities for digital ID and biometric technology providers.

Top biometrics news of the week

Biometric payments are increasing steadily enough for J.P. Morgan to double down on palm vein as a key method of authentication, but did not yield the revenues Zwipe needed to stay afloat.

The reason for the disparity may be found in the pivot away from the physical cards Zwipe supplied biometric capabilities for, whether in payment or access control.

The final blow to Zwipe was an arbitration ruling forcing payments related to a volume purchase of fingerprint sensors as the Norwegian company stretched for scale it could not quite reach.

J.P. Morgan is running pilots and making biometric POS scanners available this year ahead of a broader rollout in 2026 that will allow customers to perform authentication with palm vein or face biometrics instead of a card or other physical device.

A panel of identity document verification executives convened by Peak IDV addressed the evolution of credentials and spoofs from plastic to deepfakes in a fascinating discussion. Leaders from Inverid, Veratad, AuthenticID, Socure and Trinsic were not aligned on all points, but all agreed that the differences in verification methods are not just real but important determinates of effectiveness, now and for the foreseeable future.

Alternatively, it may have more to do with the challenges that always accompany the fight for share in regulated markets.

The market opportunities for government contracts continue to grow with digital identity on the agenda in Pakistan, which has launched the National Registration and Biometric Policy, and in the budget for Sri Lanka, which has set aside $10 million for digital transformation in 2025.

Brazil has announced its plan for a new government service for both authentication and identification using face and fingerprint biometrics. The plan sets out an opportunity for biometrics vendors that can offer NIST evaluation results, liveness compliance confirmation, meet standards for data quality and interoperability.

The EU’s AI Act mandates labeling for deepfakes, but Reality Defender notes in a recent blog post that provenance watermarks are already being removed or tampered with by malicious actors. The unfortunate consequence also leaves a market for inference-based deepfake detection, the company argues.

The UK has taken a step toward implementing its digital economy plan by signing and MoU with Anthropic to collaborate on AI tools to improve online public services. Digital ID is another part of the plan, which iProov and Yoti have made different cases for as means of addressing other social challenges.

Age assurance is one of the next markets emerging from regulation, and with the compliance clock now ticking, Ofcom shared guidance on how to prepare for Online Safety Act enforcement, and when.

A new white paper argues the UK could find a regulatory sweet spot to balance innovation with security and privacy in digital wallets, between the overarching approach of the EU and America’s fragmentation. A survey from Thales suggests digital wallets could help eliminate some common practices risking the identity and data security of Brits.

The balance appears to be eluding the U.S. government, with intelligence community insiders telling Biometric Update established security vetting practices have been cast aside in favor of a Silicon Valley approach to Americans’ data.

Opportunity also creates expectations that can be hazardous not just to firms but also their individual executives.

Clearview AI was unable to land the share of federal biometrics contracts its investors hoped for, so CEO Hoan Ton-That has left the helm to new Co-CEOs Hal Lambert and Richard Schwartz.

Scale is the lead theme of this year’s ID4Africa AGM, coming in May. But as the program released this week shows, and the organization’s EC Dr. Joseph Atick explains in an interview with Biometric Update, governance is a necessary accompanying theme.

Please tell us about any panels, podcasts or other content you think we should share with the people in biometrics and digital identity, either in the comments below or through social media.

Article Topics

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