Datasonic and Digent Place Focus on Biometrics with New Joint Venture Company

Datasonic and Digent have teamed up to form a joint venture company that will work to develop “next generation biometric applications.” Datasonic will be the majority shareholder with a 60 percent stake in the company, which has been dubbed Datasonic Digent Sdn Bhd (DDSB). Digent will control the remaining 40 percent of the venture.

Datasonic indicated that the new venture will allow it to bring a broader array of biometric products and services to the market. It is not yet clear what those services will entail, although both companies do bring considerable expertise to the partnership.

To that end, Datasonic Group Berhad, based in Malaysia, provides public and private organizations with a range of biometric identity solutions. The company is most notably responsible for issuing the Malaysian passport and the country’s MyKad national ID card.

Digent, meanwhile, offers a variety of fingerprint authentication and access control solutions, including smart card readers with fingerprint utility. The company is based in South Korea.

Malaysia has consistently been one of the earliest adopters of biometric technology, especially in the realms of passports and biometric border screening. The country’s airport operators are looking to introduce biometric passenger screening after signing a Memorandum of Understanding with SITA, while AirAsia launched its own proprietary screening solution back in 2018. Biometric data was also central to Malaysia’s dual citizenship negotiations with Thailand.

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November 5, 2019 – by Eric Weiss