Norwegian biometrics firm IDEX has said it is “re-shaping and focussing” its business to ensure successful volume commercialisation of biometric cards.In a statement, the firm said that over the past few months, the market for smartcards with biometric sensors has reached a critical inflection point.Several of the leaders in the payments ecosystem have now communicated strong commitment to develop the market, and these events are driving significant interest in deploying biometric cards. Biometric Embedded News estimates a volume of almost 350 million biometric cards in 2020, indicating a potential value of the total biometric card market of around USD 4 billion.In its statement, IDEX said it has taken a leading role in driving to the first commercial rollouts, having completed many of the world's first live pilots of biometric payment cards in 2017.”In addition, IDEX has a strong pipeline of industry-leading innovations recently announced, including an in-house matcher for cards which achieves single digit False Rejection Rate (“FRR”) with very low power and processing requirements, a demonstrated contactless ready sensor solution and a ground-breaking patented self-enrol technique. As a result, the company is firmly on track to deliver volume rollouts in 2018 across a number of key markets”.”IDEX is now actively involved with many major end customers which we expect to turn into volume shipments this year. As examples, the real-life customer trials we have done with our partners for ABSA Bank, Pick'n'Pay the major South African retailer, and UniCredit Bulbank in Bulgaria have been exceptionally successful and have led to many more trials underway or committed in the banking and retail markets. We also have a multiple additional trial activities in Asia with key card integrators”, says Dr Hemant Mardia, CEO of IDEX.Given this huge opportunity and IDEX's leading position in this market, management has been proactively re-shaping the business to drive success as the biometric card market turns to scale. These changes have involved a complete focus of resources onto biometric cards and an increased emphasis on bringing systems design and development skills in-house. In addition to assuring the business is volume ready, these changes will accelerate the company's already world-leading smartcard roadmap whilst at the same time bringing the benefit of reducing the quarterly run rate spend through 2018 below USD 6.5 million.
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