FPC Client Orders 100,000 T-Shape Sensors for Biometric Card Solution

Fingerprint Cards has received its first order for the use of its T-Shape fingerprint sensor module outside of the payments market, the company has announced.

The order is for one hundred thousand sensors to be delivered this year. Fingerprint Cards hasn’t named its client in this case, but explained in a statement that the T-Shape modules will be integrated into “a product used for safe online access and secure offline data storage.”

Naturally, the product will have the form factor of a card. Fingerprint Cards’ T-Shape solution is specifically designed for card integrations, and was first announced back in the latter half of 2017 in anticipation of an expanding cards market driven largely by the emergence of biometric payment cards. That part of the trend has started to be realized, with FPC’s T-Shape module finding its way into payment cards developed by Zwipe and Giesecke + Devrient Mobile Security; but the incorporation of the T-Shape into other kinds of smart cards is a new frontier.

“In February this year we announced our first significant order in the payment card area,” commented Fingerprint Cards’ smart cards VP Thomas Rex, referring to an order from Gemalto (which has since been acquired by Thales). “We are pleased to see that our biometric technology is spreading to new card applications and to receive this first smartcard volume order outside of the payments area.”

The announcement comes shortly after a Q2 update in which Fingerprint Cards reported a significantly improved net result year-over-year, suggesting that the company is once again on an upwards trajectory in a growing segment of the biometrics market.

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August 28, 2019 – by Alex Perala

Smart cards, as their name implies, are plastic cards with integrated circuits that allow them to contain important, rich data. The most common of these are modern credit and debit cards, as well as, in some countries, national ID cards. Biometric smart cards contain biometric data used for identification and authentication purposes.

While most biometric smart cards simply contain biometric data that can be compared to that captured by a separate biometric reader for ID verification, new advances in the production of fingerprint sensors have led us to the advent of a new type of smart card: one with an embedded biometric sensor, capable of performing 1:1 matching on-device. Learn more on FindBiometrics’ Smart Cards page.