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

good, positive growth. It just wasn’t going to be a trillion-dollar industry overnight.

Daily Wire: How much rescue work are you called upon to perform? Does anyone ever say, we’ve lumbered ourselves with this thing that doesn’t work. Bail us out, here.

Nanavati: That does happen. We’ve had government agencies come to us and say, about technology they’ve been using for a while, this is not really doing what we expected it to do; can you help us out? We’ve had jurisdictions send us data to analyze, and we’ve come back with a report on why their system wasn’t meeting their needs.

It might be that they’re collecting the wrong type of data. If you’re running a fingerprint system for a large number of people, and you’re capturing just one finger, you’re hampering yourself. You need to capture several fingers to be able to do effective matches against millions of specimens. A number of government agencies have come to us with that very problem. Our DC- and Virginia-based consultants have looked at the problem, and recommend ways to address it. And we’ve helped them to write the RFP afterwards, reviewing responses to ensure governments selected the correct companies or contractors to help them meet their needs.

Daily Wire: You have about fifty people working for IBG across five offices. How is the work parceled out among them? Regionally?

Nanavati: It’s divided up more functionally than according to regions. Some of our engineers and technical folks are on the database side. Some of them are work on integration, others more on the research side. We work on research programs where we develop new algorithms or advance the state of the art. Right now we’re working on a program for the Department of Justice, to develop Level 3 fingerprint algorithms, 5000 dpi. That’s very high resolution. Normal fingerprint algorithms are Level 2, 500 dpi. We will develop that and then turn it over to the agency that funded us. Again, we don’t sell any of it. We’re not a product company.

A number of our consultants go out to support clients. Some of these have an expertise in, say, European regulations: Shengin, VIS, all the passport regulations. Some have a specialty in hand-held mobile devices. Pretty much everyone here who’s client-facing is a subject-matter expert. And that’s where we’re somewhat differentiated from more traditional business models. IBG consultants know a lot about biometrics. They go through a very