An HS Daily Wire Q&A with IBG's co-founder Raj Nanavati

or the best graduates from the best universities. Among other things, a lot of our projects require security clearances that have to be satisfied, with background checks and so on. But we feel the time and effort spent on recruitment is essential.

Another talent stream is our database of nearly 25,000 people in the industry that we’ve worked with over the past 12 years. We know a lot of folks. Oftentimes a company gets acquired, their senior scientist leaves and comes to us first and says, hey, I know you guys, you know me. Sometimes we’re able to bring on board very talented researchers and integrators and developers who have a lot of experience, just when we need them.

However they come to us, once they come on board here we want them to stay for ten years. And they do. In fact, the main reason we ever lose someone is that they want to go on to get an additional degree or something like that. We have very little turnover in terms of people leaving IBG and going to work for another firm.

Daily Wire: How does IBG foster that kind of loyalty?

Nanavati: Our employees are so heavily invested in our ongoing training programs and gain so much exposure to a lot of different programs. With us, they know they’re on the cutting edge of the technology, working on many of the most important national security, law enforcement, and border control programs in the world. They’re working for large government agencies and they’re working for smaller start-up firms. So they get broad exposure to all of the various kinds of things that are going on in the industry.

And, given the way our company is modeled, someone set on developing into a top-notch consultant in a particular niche has access to the best-quality research, whether it’s research that we’re doing ourselves, or that we’re supporting, or that we’re monitoring. With almost any new development or advances in biometrics, we’re going to find out about it or be involved with it before just about anybody else.

Moreover there’s a solid foundation under everyone who works here. We can look back over 12 years of data, and lessons learned, and fine-tuning our capabilities - and every year we’ve gotten better. Because we’ve done it before, in many cases we can turn around projects in weeks that it might take other people months to do, or even years. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that.

Raj Nanavati

Raj Nanavati, a founding partner at International Biometric Group, is one of the biometric industry’s foremost experts in the use of biometrics in public and private sector applications. Nanavati built IBG into the biometric industry’s leading research, consulting, and integration firm, delivering a wide range of services to governments and industry for more than twelve years. He was responsible for development and execution of the biometric industry’s first comparative, multi-technology test effort in the late 1990s, and built Comparative Biometric Testing into the industry’s leading scenario-based test effort. Nanavati has extensive experience deploying biometrics in financial services applications, and has delivered extensive strategic consulting services, including business model development, feasibility studies, and competitive analysis, to biometric and non-biometric firms. Nanavati is also Director of the Department of Justice’s Sensors, Surveillance, and Biometric Technologies Center of Excellence, supporting 19,000+ law enforcement agencies nationwide. He is a much sought-after conference keynote speaker, specializing in topics such as biometrics in air travel, law enforcement applications, real-world biometric performance, and legal issues in biometric deployment. Nanavati was co-author of the book Biometrics: Identity Verification in a Networked World. He graduated from Tulane Law School Cum Laude in 1995, and was admitted to the New York State Bar in July of 1996.