Precise CEO Talks Multimodality, Disappearing Cash, and the ‘Worst Way to Use an Engineer’

One year into his tenure as CEO of Precise Biometrics, Stefan K. Persson is pleased with the company’s progress, suggest comments in an interview on the company’s blog.

Having taken the helm on August 1st of last year, Persson – a former executive with Danish home electronics makers Bang & Olufsen – came to the biometrics industry at an interesting time. The mobile biometrics market in particular had been rocked by increasing competition and dropping ASPs for fingerprint sensors – trends that naturally affected Precise Biometrics as a supplier of the algorithm software used in such sensors.

Persson and Precise Biometrics’ leadership team responded to these trends with some pretty dramatic strategic shifts. One was an expansion beyond fingerprint biometrics and into multimodality, a move that appears to revolve around Precise Biometrics’ still-developing YOUNiQ solution. In his in-house interview on the Precise Biometrics blog, Persson notes that this is starting to contribute to growing revenues from the company’s Digital Identity business, especially now that “several proof of concept pilots” are underway.

Another important shift involved corporate restructuring, with Precise Biometrics having consolidated operations in Sweden, and opened a new office in Shanghai in order to be closer to many of the company’s APAC clients. The latter has led to closer ties, and has improved efficiency – as Persson puts it, “the worst way you can utilise an engineer is to have them sitting on a flight!”

And then, of course, there’s the emerging biometric payment cards market, a development for which multiple biometrics players have been preparing for years now. Persson doesn’t elaborate much on Precise Biometrics’ efforts in this area in his interview, but he does note that cash is disappearing from daily life in many countries, and notes that it has been “predicted that by 2023, Sweden will be one of the first countries that will have digital money only” – a shift that bodes well for Precise and its partners as they prepare fingerprint-scanning payment card solutions.

The full interview can be found on Precise Biometrics’ website.

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