A £54.7 million tender to provision a Biometric Matcher Platform for law enforcement has been awarded to company, IBM. The funding will go towards developing advanced police and immigration databases to check offenders against any existing biometric records.
The Home Office, which has appointed IBM a technology partner to deliver this contract, is responsible for overseeing the issuance of passports and visas and dealing with as many fraudulent passport applications which often steal someone’s real information to renew a illegitimately issued passport.
It is also the government agency which manages immigration and secures border controls.
The biometric matching platform can be defined in a five stage process starting with transferring the services and Matching Platform and Mark to Print search capabilities from the current supplier to IBM.
The legacy automated fingerprint system called IDENT1 will be disused and biometric data collection will migrate from IABS to the Fingerprint and Face Algorithms on the unified MSP.
The contract term will last 5 years with the option to extend the delivery to phase out IDENT 1 and IABS programmes completely and introduce a single face-matching management system across immigration, law enforcement, international agencies and police.
