Precise Biometrics was born 20 years ago out of an idea by Christer Fåhraeus, a brilliant Swedish IT and biotech entrepreneur. He wanted to develop a powerful fingerprint software algorithm that could operate effectively on a platform with limited processor power and memory, such as mobile phones and smart cards.
“Back in 1997 I saw that this was going to be big in a world where fingerprints are everywhere, why not use them to open a door lock or a computer?”, said Christer Fåhraeus when he met up with his first team of three employees to reminisce at Precise Biometrics’ twentieth anniversary celebration in Lund last week.
20 years later the reality has caught up with Christer Fåhraeus vision. Today, fingerprint recognition is used globally hundreds of millions of times every day to unlock mobile devices, and the convenient and safe technology is spreading rapidly into new use areas, such as payment cards, locks, wearables and other IoT products.
“Fingerprint Technology has become the preferred choice to authenticate on smartphones and is now moving into more and more products that will be coming out on the market in the next years”, said Precise Biometrics CEO, Håkan Persson, in a speech at the celebration.
Today there is a fierce competition to deliver smaller, more cost-effective sensors, and the requirements on biometric performance and security have increased. This development fits Precise Biometrics like a hand in glove. From the very start, Precise Biometrics set out to develop algorithm solutions for fast and secure matching under the toughest conditions.
“Our Precise BioMatch™ software has from the very beginning been sensor technology agnostic, making us well-positioned for the upcoming technology shift towards ultrasound or optical sensors. These fingerprint sensors can be placed under the smartphone display, enabling new design possibilities, lowering production costs while improving user convenience and security” said Håkan Persson.
As biometrics is increasingly used for authorizing mobile payments and other sensitive applications, the need for higher security and fraud mitigation is growing. By adding anti-spoofing and liveness detection capability to Precise Biometrics software solutions and being able to integrate fingerprint matching in an Embedded Secure Element, eSE, Precise Biometrics is now able to deliver fingerprint authentication with bank grade security for both mobile and embedded devices.
“This is a stunning development. And more is yet to come. One might say that Precise Biometrics has been able to surpass Christer Fåhraeus visions 20 years ago”, said Håkan Persson.