This week’s biometrics industry news spanned a wide number of applications and topics keeping an emphasis on the future of the industry. A number of reports, a major investment and a telling blog post from Visa Europe all placed our gaze on the optimistic future of identity management technology. Meanwhile in the featured articles, we continued down the Road to Biometrics UnPlugged with an examination of what benefits biometric banking can bring to the end user.
Starting with commerce news, in a new blog post on the Visa Europe website, the company’s director of new payment propositions, Jonathan Vaux, named biometrics as one of the contributing factors in what looks like a rise of card-on-file payment popularity. The post was written in response to what Vaux recognized as an increasing number of announcements from tech players involving identity authentication services and new ways to upload card details to the cloud. It ends with a call to action, encouraging the development of new standards, processes and capabilities aimed at enabling these technologies.
A report released this week by Acuity Market Intelligence had us thinking about the future of National ID. The numbers from “The Global National eID Industry Report: 2014 Edition” cover the period between 2013 and 2018, indicating that during that time National Electronic ID (eID) programs will generate $54 billion in revenue. According to the report, in five years half of the world’s population will have a National eID card.
This week also saw some forecasting on the market bringing voice biometrics behind the steering wheel. A report from Research and Markets cited a combination of human-machine interface tech growth and a boom in voice biometric technology as a key driver in the Global Automotive Voice Recognition Market. According to the report, the market will grow at a CAGR of 10.59 percent from 2014 through 2018.
This week also had Peter O’Neill, president of findBIOMETRICS, interviewing Won Lee, president and CEO of SecuGen. The discussion begins with an overview of the company history, its product line and business model, before getting into the details of SecuGen’s expansion into India and how the company is going to be making moves in the mobile space.
Moving on to the big investment news, EyeVerify, the Kansas City startup specializing in eye-based vascular biometrics, gained four major backers this week to the tune of a combined $6 million strategic investment. Samsung Electronics, SprintCorp, a major U.S. banking institution and Qihoo 360 Technology are all counted as new investors. EyeVerify’s CEO, Toby Rush, says that the new investment will be used to further improve the technology and mine for new partners and customers.
Moving to deployments and lunch announcements, ievo released a new Custom Kit this week, allowing customers to build their own biometric access systems. The solution gives users a range of options when choosing a biometric access control solution, allowing the possibility of card integration, increased template capacity and Power over Ethernet features.
Finger vein technology from Hitachi and MIG is further bringing biometric healthcare to Turkey. This week, Hitachi Europe announced that, in support of the country’s continuing biometric healthcare adoption, it is rolling out BIOMIG devices: mobile WiFi scanners featuring the company’s finger vein recognition technology.
Finally, ending on a heartwarming note, FacialNetwork – a company who received a lot of attention in February when Senator Al Franken used its technology as an example of privacy concerns with biometric and mobility – announced a new product suite including a solution designed to aid users with face blindness.
Continue to stay posted to findBIOMETRICS throughout July as we continue down the road to findBIOMETRICS. Be sure to follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss a beat.
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July 13, 2014 – by Peter B. Counter
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