Year in Review: A Portrait of the Biometrics Industry in 2019

The biometrics industry is enormous, and highly varied. It encompasses a range of technologies and spans across many sectors and myriad applications. And it’s still growing, with new opportunities and challenges constantly emerging. That’s why it is so important to try to get a clear view of the big picture, and one of the best tools for doing that is the annual FindBiometrics Year in Review survey.

Aimed at professionals within the biometrics field as well as adjacent industries – with over 230 participants this year, our biggest sample yet – the Year in Review survey offers us a mirror, helping to clarify what the biometrics industry looks like as a whole, where professionals stand on key issues, where there is consensus, and where there is debate. This year’s poll revealed, for example, that the vast majority of industry pros agree that privacy is a fundamental right, but it also found some confusion over how the privacy issue should be regulated. It also found stark disagreement over whether biometrics are a controversial technology, signalling that the industry is still very much trying to find its footing on issues such as facial recognition and surveillance.

These kinds of results can help those within the industry to understand the issues that biometrics specialists are now confronting. Meanwhile, areas of strong agreement can help industry professionals to chart the way forward. If virtually everyone agrees that educating the public about biometrics is important, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to get various stakeholders to sign onto educational initiatives; likewise, the fact that a huge majority of Year in Review respondents agreed that standardized biometric testing is crucial for the industry’s future reaffirms the importance of testing bodies like NIST and iBeta, and the results that their testing can produce.

That kind of information is useful to pretty much everyone in the industry, and then there’s more niche-focused data about modalities, applications, use cases, and the like that will be of interest to professionals in various specialized areas. All of this adds up to a highly detailed, comprehensive picture of the biometrics industry at a time of change, challenge, opportunity, and progress.

Dig deeper into the 2019 FindBiometrics Year in Review results and analysis:

• Year in Review: FinServ Consolidates Its Hold and Citizen ID Makes a Bold Debut in Top Applications
• Year in Review: A Status Quo Surprise for the Most Exciting Biometric Modalities
• Year in Review: When Do We Think Biometrics Will Replace the Password?
• Year in Review: ‘Friction’ is Still a Bad Word
• Year in Review: The Appeal of Biometric Airport Screening
• Year in Review: The Consensus Solidifies on Biometrics Testing
• Year in Review: Consensus on Privacy, and Confusion Over Regulation
• Year in Review: Using Biometrics to Buy Beer and Cannabis
• Year in Review: An Industry Divided Over Controversy
• Year in Review: 98% Support Educating the Public on Biometrics

Listen to industry leaders discuss 2019 in identity and biometrics on the ID Talk Podcast:

• ID Talk Podcast: IDEMIA’s Matt Thompson on the Evolution of Mobile ID
• ID Talk Podcast: Jumio’s Dean Nicolls on AI, Biometrics and Fighting Fraud
• ID Talk Podcast: The Decade in Biometric Border Control With CLEAR CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker
• ID Talk Podcast: Iris ID’s Year in Review, Healthcare Biometrics, and Government Applications
• ID Talk Podcast: SecuGen’s Year in Review and Optical Fingerprint Biometrics Innovation
• ID Talk Podcast: Aware’s Year in Review and the Road to Automotive Biometrics
• ID Talk Podcast: BioConnect’s Year in Review, Unifying Physical and Digital Identity
• ID Talk Podcast: FacePhi CEO Javier Mira on Biometric Banking and the Year in Review

Read more highlights from expert survey participants:

• Year in Review: The Industry Speaks, Part 1 – Surfing the Privacy Wave as Biometrics Surge
• Year in Review: The Industry Speaks, Part 2 – Education and Transformation in Biometrics
• Year in Review: The Industry Speaks, Part 3 – Contactless, Frictionless, Invisible Biometrics
• Year in Review: The Industry Speaks, Part 4 – Simplifying Life with Biometrics

Check back regularly as we bring the Year in Review to a close with our final special event podcasts and industry speaks interviews.

*

The 2019 FindBiometrics Year in Review is made possible by our sponsors: Aware, Inc., Clear, IDEMIA, SecuGen, Iris ID, FacePhi, Jumio, BioConnect, BIO-key.

—

February 19, 2020 – by the FindBiometrics Editorial Team