The overall biometrics market is going to reach $26.8 billion USD in revenues by the year 2020, according to a new report from ABI Research. The market analysis firm sees high potential, but also notes dispiriting challenges for the industry.
The biggest challenge lies essentially in some companies over-promising and under-delivering. It isn’t deliberate, but rather the result of clients not fully understanding what they’re shopping for. In a report synopsis, ABI Research Analyst Dimitrios Pavlakis says that too often he and his colleagues “see companies not initially getting the expected ROI because of the combination of modality-application-vertical they chose to employ,” adding that false acceptance and false rejection rates are “overly advertised” at the expense of other potentially important considerations such as “data quality, data storage, scalability, compatibility, application effectiveness, environmental fluctuations, and technical specifications among others.”
While that’s undoubtedly a serious issue, the industry remains in good shape with constantly advancing technological sophistication. ABI’s report points to the emergence of near-infrared iris scanning and ultrasound fingerprint scanning systems as examples of powerful new technologies that are increasingly finding applications in the financial services sector, while biometric technology in general continues to reinforce its value in law enforcement, and government applications. It’s also growing in consumer sectors, as we’ve seen in the rise of fingerprint scanning systems and other exciting authentication systems proliferating on mobile devices.
The ABI report is more optimistic than other recent predictions. A report from Strategic Defence Intelligence, looking at a longer forecast period, suggested that the overall biometrics market would reach a value of only $10.2 billion by 2025; while TechSci Research suggested that it would grow at a relatively modest CAGR of 14 percent until 2020. In any case, all analysts seems to agree that strong growth is in the cards, differing only in the degree to which they expect it.
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July 23, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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