Biometric spending to reach $7.3 billion in 2013

New research claims that broad interest and investment in an array of biometrics technologies around the world will drive spending to $7.3 billion by 2013, up from around $3 billion in 2008.

Interest in biometrics was kick-started by the new wave of terrorism in the early years of this decade, according to ABI Research, but it has taken time to lead into sales and adoption. In the meantime, the biometrics vendors and the system integrators that have led the way in biometrics deployments have worked hard to prove the value and efficiency of the technology as well as to enable multi-technology, multi-vendor capabilities.

"Over the next five years the effort to create standards for biometrics technologies will be rewarded with a significant growth in biometrics system adoption," says Jonathan Collins, principal analyst at ABI Research.

Growth will be driven by increased emphasis on security in both the public and private sectors but it will be underpinned by a raft of technology standards that have enabled more interoperable systems to emerge.

Face, iris, hand, and speech recognition systems have emerged and are being adopted independently and alongside fingerprints, which will continue be the dominant biometric measurement for some time to come. Nevertheless, it will be increasingly essential for organizations and companies, as they secure their facilities, equipment, and data, to understand the potential of each of these technologies as well as the potential to combine them to drive system efficiency and reliability.

There is also an emerging interest in biometrics as means toward greater convenience, simplicity, and speed in the transactions of daily life. Biometrics is being offered in laptops and mobile phones - to secure but also speed and simplify log-in - while "registered traveller" applications are emerging to speed passengers through airports.

The company envisages that biometrics will increasingly move from being the traditional preserve of large-scale public sector systems to become adopted in small-scale private sector and even personal systems use.