Year in Review: The Industry Speaks, Part 1 – Surfing the Privacy Wave as Biometrics Surge

The FindBiometrics Year in Review is a massive industry event, collecting the opinions of biometrics industry experts from a wide range of backgrounds. Each year our industry survey checks the industry pulse on the popularity of biometric modalities, the excitement around specific vertical markets, and attitudes toward critical industry issues like privacy, regulation and public perception.

Our 2019 survey collected responses from over 230 industry experts, and our analysis of the results thus far has been enlightening as we set the stage for a new decade of biometrics. To balance out the larger industry discussion, it’s time to take a look at how 2019 was for many of the companies that participated in the Year in Review.

FindBiometrics reached out to survey respondents, asking for a snapshot of their year, their opinions on industry opportunities, and what we can expect so see from them in 2020. In part one of our multi-part series, we are profiling answers from Aerendir, TECH5, and Hitachi.  

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What was your company’s biggest accomplishment in 2019?

Our biggest accomplishment was bringing our first three products – foolproof authenticator, anti-bot and strong encryption – into the business-to-business realm after developing our code to fit production-grade while still focusing on user-experience. We are frictionless driven without compromising performance.

We also announced a partnership with SiFive, a semiconductor company, to create affordable cloudless on-device AI. We think this will be an important jump to expand the Internet of things beyond what was previously imagined. We believe cloudless connectivity also enforces user privacy once our body becomes our password and protection.  

What is the greatest opportunity facing the biometrics industry?

The public may be apprehensive about using biometrics because of the rise of biometric data breaches, spoof attacks and the uncontrolled abuse of private data for monetization purposes. Any online breach has obvious off-line consequences. Now that there is a public debate, the industry will have this unique opportunity to focus more on the ‘how’ and less on the ‘what’. This means it will redefine quality.

The greatest opportunity for the industry is to include more than just False Positive Rate & True Positive Rate and performance testing. It will start measuring resilience, hackability, spoofability, and privacy by design to get a full picture of how we can successfully implement biometric systems that will be both safe and effective. This will allow the public to have choices and not to fall prey to the actual dangerous situations. 

What does your company have in store for 2020?

Riding the privacy storm. It’s a wave we helped create for four years now, so we may as well surf it.

We can be a Zero-to-One company while at the same time hanging 10!

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What was your company’s biggest accomplishment in 2019?

TECH5’s biggest achievement in 2019 was that we have been successful in scaling our technologies, extending our reach to national scale ID programs with total database sizes of 100 million and upward in terms of number of records. This has been one of our key objectives. In 2019 we have successfully deployed our face recognition systems in Asia with a total database of 250 million.

What is the greatest opportunity facing the biometrics industry?

A key opportunity that we have in front of us in the biometrics industry is to capitalize fully on the pervasive use of mobile devices. Mobile platforms more and more represent the preferred touch-point and communication channel between customers and service providers, from opening bank accounts in a digital onboarding process up to storing ones key credentials such as a driver’s license or national ID card.

Implementing both capture technology across biometrics as well as liveness detection functionality on a standard mobile device will open up significant opportunities for the industry in the areas of registration, authentication, and identification services.

What does your company have in store for 2020?

We have a great number of exciting events and product launches in store for 2020. We will unveil TECH5 EagleEye, our new surveillance offering building on TECH5 top performing Face Recognition technology. We are already getting many enquirers for this new platform targeting a very fast growing biometric application segment.

Secondly, we will launch several new mobile biometrics applications suites tailored to mobile registration, digital onboarding, and customer authentication. Finally, we will have direct presence at key shows like ID4Africa to be held in Morocco at the beginning of June of 2020, as well as Identity Week London and Singapore, where we invite our customers and contacts to meet us and be briefed on they can benefit from TECH5 products and solutions tailored to their needs.

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What was your company’s biggest accomplishment in 2019?

The release of our second generation device with Barclays. Launching a new biometric device with a customer of this size was a great achievement.

What is the greatest opportunity facing the biometrics industry?

We are standing on the edge of a huge biometric surge. The public is ready for it and almost demanding it in many cases, as the reliance on usernames and passwords just won’t cut it moving forward. Being able to accurately identify the user easily and swiftly is going to be game changing. This is not only for security reasons, but ultimately a superior customer experience.

What does your company have in store for 2020?

2020 is going to be a landmark year for Hitachi in the biometrics space as we launch the new range of solutions that does not require physical readers. All of this will be delivered using the standard laptop, mobile or tablet cameras. The early testing and user acceptance has been excellent for laptop password replacement. With the other solutions on mobile and tablet early next year, and with an on demand version delivered by a web browser following quickly. It’s going to be a really exciting year for us and our customers.

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Stay tuned to FindBiometrics as we continue to highlight the participants of our 17th Annual Year in Review.

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February 4, 2020 – The FindBiometrics Editorial Team