Mobile Payments, Point-of-Sale, Multifactor, and Passive Authentication Top Choices for Biometric Innovators

With the biometrics market to exceed $10 billion by 2021, ABI Research identifies four technologies that innovative and agile startups must incorporate into their solutions to secure significant share in the changing competitive landscape: multifactor authentication (MFA), point-of-sale (PoS), mobile payments, and passive authentication.  

“Companies can no longer afford to cut corners when it comes to security,” says Dimitrios Pavlakis, Industry Analyst at ABI Research. “Pairing biometrics with MFA and passive authentication is a natural evolution of the technology, as it complements traditional authentication with higher security factors that can be further adjusted as part of a greater risk assessment system.”

ABI Research finds HYPR, KnuEdge, UnifyID, and Yubico to be proven innovators in the global biometrics market. The companies create and deliver pioneering solutions that incorporate high-tech with low-cost hardware tokens, decentralize control using blockchain multimodal biometrics, feature military-grade voice recognition, or even leverage a host of connected sensors to gait biometrics for seamless authentication.

Payments are also a driving force within the biometrics market, particularly as millennials fuel adoption rates for new applications. Companies like Atom Bank, Biyo, Nymi, Smart Metric, Veridium, VKansee, and Zwipe are disrupting the market landscape through transformative technologies ranging from continuous heart rate recognition in wearables, high resolution spoof-resistant sensors, smart card embedded fingerprint sensors, biometrical digital-only banking solutions, as well as four-finger recognition and palm-vein payments.

“Successful vendors will need to tackle convenience and interoperability factors, minimize total cost of ownership without compromising security, as well as prove their abilities to comply with emerging industry specifications that do not compromise data privacy,” concludes Pavlakis.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Hot Tech Innovators: Biometrics report.