Stefan K Persson joined Precise Biometrics as CEO in August 2018, after almost four years at Bang & Olufsen as Executive Vice President. In this blog post, he shares some of his thoughts on biometrics and its evolution, which is summed up in this inspirational video.

Biometrics have been used for border control and law enforcement for decades, but it wasn’t until five years ago, with the launch of Touch-ID, that biometrics were used for personal identification. Today, most mobile devices come with biometrics, primarily fingerprint, but devices are increasingly being equipped with more than one biometric feature, often a combination of fingerprint and face. This further increases the user convenience as multimodality enables the user to choose the biometric feature that suites the specific situation. For example, using fingerprint when its dark or face when your fingers are wet.

Our devices are more and more turning into our personal authenticators. As such, protecting our digital identity becomes even more important. Using face or fingerprint like we do today is the first step towards more convenient and secure authentication. In order to execute payments and transactions totally carefree, any time, with any application or service in a secure manner, we need new type of solutions that looks beyond the way we authenticate today.

I believe that the next step in the evolution of mobile biometrics are solutions that combine different types of biometrics and technology to verify a person, with minimal or no action by the user itself. Such solutions will provide continuous identity authentication, increasing user convenience and security.

I also believe that biometrics will go beyond self-authentication in the future. The way we use biometrics today is just the first step, soon biometrics will be everywhere, in our homes, cars and work places. They will not only be used for authentication but also for personalization and interaction with our daily interfaces.

For instance, my home will recognize me as I’m walking on the driveway and unlock the door. As I walk into the house, it will start playing my music. My car will do the same thing, for example, unlock as I approach, adjust to my settings and provide me with directions to my next location.

To me, biometrics is an extremely interesting area that is far from reaching its full potential. I’m very excited about being a part of this development and look forward to making people lives more convenient and secure with biometrics.

By Stefan K Persson