Signs of market strength for biometric payment cards and facial recognition are prominent among the week’s most-read articles on Biometric Update, with Idemia standing out for several wins, also involving France’s digital ID. Zwipe made gains on two continents, while OneSpan, Onfido and Trulioo have new selfie biometrics customers, and AnyVision is calling for three principles to guide new rules for police use of facial recognition in the UK. Little wonder the facial recognition market is expected to reach $8.5 billion in 2025.

Top biometrics news of the week

Zwipe is supplying its biometric payment card technology to a top-tier global bank for a pilot it plans to conduct in three countries, and has booked a separate commercial order for several times its second-quarter revenue towards the commercial rollout of fingerprint-enabled cards in the Middle East. The company’s biometric payment card partner Idemia is supplying its FCode for debit cards in Libya, and Idex Biometrics’ CEO sees the technology eventually taking primacy among retail payment methods due to the pandemic.

Idemia is also providing its digital ID authentication technology to the French government through a new contract to enable the use of national ID cards in online transactions. The new version of the CNIe contains a highly-secure chip with the bearer’s biometric data, and sign-up rates for the platform underpinning the system by people and service providers bode well for the success of the program.

In the U.S., Idemia is bringing IdentoGo tablets to state motor vehicles departments (DMVs), starting with Kentucky, to enable remote enrollment of biometrics and other data for ID issuance. The biometric tablet is expected to help make services available to people in remote locations, and support Idemia’s ‘One DMV Visit for Life’ vision.

The W.H.O.’s guidelines for COVID-19 certificates are intended first and foremost for continuity of care, and as such mostly avoid the thorny issues around digital identity that have caused consternation and brought together other groups of stakeholders. The guidance stipulates barcodes or QR codes, either on a printed document or in digital form, along with PKI for data sharing.

A report from BankservAfrica and PwC argues that South Africa can realize greater impact on its economy from digital identity if it is made a government policy priority and businesses work together to develop integrated solutions. The report reviews the ID situation in the country and different approaches it can take, and uses popular success stories about digital ID and growing national economies to illustrate the potential benefits available.

NIMC is getting $61 million to invest in Nigeria’s digital identity infrastructure, which seems likely to include personnel. The agency has reportedly been losing some of its talent to overseas employers, hindering the NIN registration effort, which has reached 62 million people.

AnyVision addressed its feedback on the UK’s proposed update of its Surveillance Camera Code of Practice to Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Professor Fraser Sampson calling for specific measures to ensure facial recognition use by police is ethical. A UK government committee was cautioned, meanwhile, about the use of new technologies, including predictive algorithms as well as facial recognition, by police.

Baltimore’s local ordinance regulating facial recognition use in the private sector came into effect this week, as noted by Hunton Andrews Kurth’s Privacy & Information Security Law Blog, after being passed in August. The bill bans “face surveillance” like biometric loss prevention systems, though not access control deployments. The bill will expire in 2022, if not given a five-year extension.

Selfie biometrics for remote identity verification remains a growth area, with new partners for Veratad and GBG, and customer wins for OneSpan, Onfido and Trulioo. Australia is public beta testing an app with iProov technology, and investments have been closed by A.ID and WebID.

Technavio forecasts the global market for facial recognition will grow by 12.4 percent from 2021 to 2025, adding just under $3.8 billion in revenue, driven largely by online use cases. That means the market was worth close to $4.8 billion last year, and will reach $8.5 billion in five years.

Researchers from the International Committee of the Red Cross and World Economic Forum have separately weighed in on the lessons of the terrible risk of misuse of the biometric devices and information abandoned in the collapse of Afghanistan’s elected government. Better data protection technology and consultation are at the core of their respective suggestions.

Rob Campbell, head of Callsign’s industry and product marketing, breaks down the U.S. CFPB’s Reg E, and new guidance which makes clear that banks are expected to minimize the risk of social engineering fraud. This puts pressure on banks to detect sophisticated attacks, and Campbell sees behavioral biometrics as an effective way to comply.

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Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  data protection  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  government services  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  onboarding