Global biometrics market to grow at nearly 17 percent CAGR

PUNE, India—Research firm MarketsandMarkets expects the global biometrics market to reach almost $33 billion by 2022, with North America being a large portion of the market.

“North America will continue to be the largest region for [the] biometric system market in 2022,” Sachin Garg, MarketsandMarkets' associate director - electronics & semiconductor, told Security Systems News in an email interview.

“The regulatory-driven activities and initiatives taken by the governments will enable the biometric system market in North America to be the highest revenue generator. To provide better security for customers, the banks and financial institutes in North America have started providing multi-factor biometric authentication,” he continued.

The global biometrics market was worth $10.74 billion in 2015, according to MarketsandMarkets, and it will reach about $32.73 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 16.79 percent between 2016 and 2022.

“The biometric system market in North America was valued at $3.76 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $11.59 billion growing at a CAGR of 16.98 percent between 2016 and 2022,” Anand Shanker, research analyst - electronics & semiconductor for MarketsandMarkets said via email.

Approaches to biometrics will change over the forecast period. “Growth in adoption of multi-factor authentication methods, as the integration of fingerprint, face, and iris recognition technologies is expected to widen their adoption due to the low error rate and would become a standard in verticals such as government agencies, airports, and border control in the coming years,” Garg said.

“Fingerprint will continue to be the most prevalent technology till 2022,” Vaibhav Chaudhari, MarketsandMarkets' senior research analyst electronics & semiconductor, said. “Fingerprint recognition is more commonly used in travel and immigration, fingerprint recognition is used in e-passports, e-visas, driving license to authenticate an individual.”

Chaudhari pointed to several factors driving the market. “The government initiatives to adopt biometrics in various fields, integration of biometrics in smartphones, use of biometric technology in financial institutes and healthcare sectors and increasing use of biometrics in criminal identification are the major drivers for the growth of biometric system market,” he said.

Another technological development in the market is the potential for artificial intelligence in biometric authentication. “Companies are working toward integrating deep learning with facial recognition as deep learning-based face representation are robust [against] misalignment and are able to tolerate facial localization errors,” Garg said.

Biometrics' most prevalent application over the period will be in government, though the market is also changing and expanding elsewhere. “Traditionally biometrics was mostly used by government agencies, military & defense for critical security purpose. There has been a shift in applications where biometrics can be used,” Garg said. “There has been increase in adoption of biometric systems for commercial and domestic security. Biometric systems are being used for applications such as access control, time & attendance and visitor management.”

Shanker also identified military and defense and the BFSI sector as having upcoming uses for biometrics.

Biometrics also have potential in the IoT space, Garg noted. “With billions of devices being connected together, traditional methods of user authentication are now inadequate and ineffective in the IoT. Utilizing biometrics will lead to a convenient and secure IoT infrastructure,” he said.

The biometrics market also faces challenges, particularly with data security concerns. “Security of biometric data, fear of privacy intrusion and high cost involved in deploying biometric systems are the major factors that can hinder the growth of the biometric system market,” Shanker said.

“Unlike passwords or smart cards, biometric information describes a person, and hence it is unlikely to be reset or reproduced should it be compromised,” Shanker continued.

Key vendors in the biometrics market include Safran SA, NEC Corporation, 3M Cogent Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and BIO-Key International Inc. among others.