Year in Review: FinServ Consolidates Its Hold and Citizen ID Makes a Bold Debut in Top Applications

The results for the FindBiometrics’ 2019 Year in Review are in, with over 230 responses from industry experts offering the latest insights into how those most familiar with biometric technology see the state of the art. FindBiometrics is kicking off its Year in Review analysis with a look at the year’s most interesting application areas for biometric technology.

The most notable result from this year’s applications question is the rise of “Citizen ID”, which was tied for second place with the “Enterprise (including converged access control)” option, with each of the categories taking 13 percent of the vote. Citizen ID was a new category in the 2019 survey, and may go some way in explaining why “Other” was selected by almost a quarter of all respondents in the 2018 survey; in this year’s results, “Other” got just 8 percent of the result, and responses included gaming, marketing and military applications.

It’s no wonder that Citizen ID was named the most interesting application area for biometric technology by so many respondents. India’s Aadhaar program – the world’s most ambitious biometric national ID system – is a regular topic in industry news, and a growing number of other countries around the world are also exploring the use of biometrics in new and revamped national ID programs.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise category’s tie for second is unsurprising. Putting aside the Other category’s success in last year’s results, Enterprise was a clear second-place winner with 14 percent of the vote, thanks to the growing adoption of biometric security by enterprise organizations across a wide range of sectors. This trend remained prominent through the course of 2019; it would have been a surprise to see a significant drop in its ranking among survey respondents.

As for the top spot in the 2019 survey’s ranking of the most interesting applications, the winner was once again financial services. This category did even better this year than it did last year, rising from 26 percent of the vote in 2018 to 30 percent in our latest survey. Much of this can probably be attributed to the ongoing ascent of selfie authentication, with a growing number of financial services providers leveraging facial recognition together with the smartphones that so many consumers happen to have in their pockets in order to both authenticate customers and even onboard new customers.

Also worth noting in this year’s results are the showings from the “Border Control” (11 percent), “Law Enforcement” (9 percent), and “Consumer device access” (9 percent) categories, which all captured relatively modest but substantial slices of the applications pie.

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

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January 9, 2020 – by Alex Perala