Biometrics Find Their Way in the Car Sharing Economy - P2

This is the second of a two-part insight entitled “Biometrics Find Their Way in the Car Sharing Economy” dealing with the use of biometrics as part of the emerging car hailing and car sharing ventures. In the previous insight, different environmental, consumer and legislative factors, among others, were mentioned as contributing factors to the ever-increasing usage of biometrics for companies such as Uber and Lyft. While there has been (and still is) friction in this transitionary phase, younger companies seem to have an easier time adapting to the implementation of biometric technologies. Two major examples concern the companies Little Cab and Zipcar.

Given biometrics’ obvious success in the commercial electronics market and users’ positive attitude towards new physiological and behavioral technologies, Kenya’s response to Uber, called Little Cab, has partnered with Safaricom and Microsoft (making use of Microsoft Cognitive API as part of Azure Services) and operates with a different mentality. Instead of resisting certain biometric implementations like its competitors, Little Cab actually seems to embrace it and move toward this objective much more aggressively.

Kamal Budhabatti, founder of Little Cab and CEO of Craft Silicon, makes the case that Little Cab cannot presently compete with the current capital amassed by other tech giants in the car-hailing industry. Instead, the company decided to “embrace the technology” and rise through innovation. This approach is backed up by the numerous studies portraying quite favorable consumer views towards biometric security and is an important element in the feature timing list mentioned in previous insight regarding biometric security in the emerging car sharing economy.

Good faith in the market alone will not get any company out of a governmental registration request, but placing the technology in center-view of one’s mission statement will definitely go a long way when it comes to facing these hurdles. Little Cab performed impressively last year, exceeding expectations in 2016 and forcing Uber to slash its prices in order to stay more competitive. Little Cab has approximately 2,000 drivers using its app in East Africa and the company is expected to officially expand to other large markets such as Uganda and Nigeria in 2017.

Zipcar is another car sharing company making headlines. Since August 2016, Zipcar has announced that its users can make use of face recognition through its mobile app to authenticate themselves while also matching the picture on a valid driver’s license with a “selfie”. A great way to further increase usage of biometrically-infused apps in the car sharing business model is the application of the decade-old technique for “pushing” biometrics, which can be summarized in the motto: “If you go biometric, you can go VIP”.

This technique has been used (quite successfully) to allow VIP treatment for customers at clubs wishing to implant biometric RFID chips in their arms and hands. Currently, most of the aforementioned car sharing companies are not there yet – and that’s a good thing! However, the principle still stands. Zipcar users, for example, can make use of the face recognition functionality to lock a car for their service and instantly reserve their choice instead of waiting for a RFID Zipcar card to arrive at their location or them visiting a Zipcar office to obtain one. ABI Research will continue to monitor this market and offer additional insights according to further developments. At least for now it would seem that other than legislative and regulatory issues there are fewer and fewer obstacles every year for employing biometrics as a security feature in car sharing and car hailing ventures.