The advance of biometric smart cards for digital identity and payments, and their eventual replacement by apps in the former case, is the top theme of the week’s biometrics news. Even in an industry somewhat numbed to enormous growth forecasts, there are some sizeable numbers being projected in digital ID app use and potential addressable card fraud. Facial recognition improvement efforts and controversy also made headlines.
A pair of new smart card solutions, one with multi-modal biometrics for access control and payments from CrucialTrak, and a ‘Converged Card’ from Idemia and Mastercard that combines a government ID, like a mobile driver’s license, with payment functionality, made up the top news story of the week on Biometric Update.
Contactless biometric retail payments are on the rise, whether with fingerprint-enabled cards, which Idex Biometrics argues could cut down the $10 billion banks lose to card fraud each year, or with palm biometric scanners, as Amazon is exploring.
An oversubscribed private placement and subsequent offering from Zwipe has wrapped up, with the company raising roughly $11.6 million in total to position itself in the commercializing fingerprint payment cards market. Several primary insiders invested during the subsequent offering to maintain their stakes in the company, and could have placed an additional 1.5 million shares if the offer shares had not run out first.
National ID cards are also in the news, with Nepal finding a way around the delays to its biometrics enrollment project caused by the pandemic and Croatia tabling legislation to issue cards for regional use. Meanwhile, Iran has produced 2.6 million ID cards in-country, replacing formerly imported cards, and Ghana has launched biometrics services for passports at its embassy in Rome.
Five years from now there will be more than six billion digital identity apps in use around the world, up from just over a billion today, according to a Juniper Research forecast. The research also suggests that those civic identity apps will be their predominant form, and that there will be 40 percent more digital ID apps than cards by 2025.
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