IBM Selected to Take Over UK Home Office’s Biometric Project

The United Kingdom’s Home Office has awarded a £54.7 million contract to IBM to support its biometric system for law enforcement and immigration services.

Fujitsu had been awarded an earlier contract to provide biometric matching technology for the Home Office Biometrics project in 2018, but reports emerged earlier this year that the Home Office was in search of a new vendor after Fujitsu’s contract expired in March.

Aware, Inc. was also involved in Fujitsu’s earlier work for the Home Office. In 2018, the company announced that its Biometric Services Platform (BioSP) would play an important role in providing workflows and a layer of abstraction between multiple biometric matchers and subsystems for border control, immigration, and law enforcement applications.

IBM’s task involves implementing a Matcher Service Platform (MSP) that will support biometric matching functions using fingerprint and face biometrics. The platform includes a “service bus” to facilitate biometric transaction processing logic, biometric workflow rules, integration of matching engine software (MES), and a service interface used by external subsystems.

As part of the contract, IBM will also create an infrastructure platform to host and provide computing capacity for these services. The project has a five-year term, with the option to extend for an additional three years.

The contract will involve transitioning and managing the existing Matcher Platform, previously developed by Fujitsu, as well as introducing new search capabilities and decommissioning legacy algorithms for the police service biometric data system, IDENT1, and the immigration and asylum biometric information system (IABS).

Source: The Register, UK Home Office

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August 2, 2023 – by the FindBiometrics Editorial Team