Year in Review: A Portrait of the Biometrics Industry in 2019

The biometrics industry is enormous, and highly varied. It encompasses a range of technologies and spans across many sectors and myriad applications. And it’s still growing, with new opportunities and challenges constantly emerging. That’s why it is so important to try to get a clear view of the big picture, and one of the best tools for doing that is the annual FindBiometrics Year in Review survey.

Aimed at professionals within the biometrics field as well as adjacent industries – with over 230 participants this year, our biggest sample yet – the Year in Review survey offers us a mirror, helping to clarify what the biometrics industry looks like as a whole, where professionals stand on key issues, where there is consensus, and where there is debate. This year’s poll revealed, for example, that the vast majority of industry pros agree that privacy is a fundamental right, but it also found some confusion over how the privacy issue should be regulated. It also found stark disagreement over whether biometrics are a controversial technology, signalling that the industry is still very much trying to find its footing on issues such as facial recognition and surveillance.

These kinds of results can help those within the industry to understand the issues that biometrics specialists are now confronting. Meanwhile, areas of strong agreement can help industry professionals to chart the way forward. If virtually everyone agrees that educating the public about biometrics is important, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to get various stakeholders to sign onto educational initiatives; likewise, the fact that a huge majority of Year in Review respondents agreed that standardized biometric testing is crucial for the industry’s future reaffirms the importance of testing bodies like NIST and iBeta, and the results that their testing can produce.

That kind of information is useful to pretty much everyone in the industry, and then there’s more niche-focused data about modalities, applications, use cases, and the like that will be of interest to professionals in various specialized areas. All of this adds up to a highly detailed, comprehensive picture of the biometrics industry at a time of change, challenge, opportunity, and progress.