Fingerprinting to remain dominant biometric technology

A recent report from ResearchandMarkets on biometric market trends says that fingerprinting recognition is expected to remain the dominant technology in terms of revenues and number of deployments in the financial sector. Its advantages of acceptable accuracy, low hardware costs, and wide applicability to different financial applications will drive its dominance. In the long term, major growth is expected to come from developing regions such as Asia Pacific and Latin America, where the stringent privacy laws and negative impressions of fingerprinting do not restrain adoption. In 2006, fingerprint applications cornered an overwhelming 88.7 percent of revenues in logical access control (LAC) applications, which are expected to see the fastest growth of all applications within the financial segment.

Among the different regions, the North American region, consisting of the United States and Canada, had the highest share of revenues in 2006 with 38.4 percent. Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) came in a close second with 36.2 percent, benefiting from the high growth in transactional authentication, especially in the voice biometrics domain. There has also been demand for high-security access control technology such as iris recognition from the high-end Swiss private banks. “Going forward, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region in the financial biometrics sector,” says the report’s author. “With the economies of most Asian countries booming, the demand for financial services is high. Moreover, banks are also looking to differentiate themselves from the competition by offering value-added services and more self-service banking options.”