Company News

Elyctis Opens Subsidiary in Senegal

After Hong Kong and India, secure identity company Elyctis is opening an Africa subsidiary in Senegal, to cover the booming African eID market.

This market is becoming a hotbed of identity expansion and innovation. In order to sustain this growth with a permanent presence in the field, Elyctis is opening to provide better services to its African customers.

The countries of the Economic Community of West African States (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo) have adopted a common standard for national eID cards, based on the ICAO specification, that guarantees interoperability between countries.

Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire, for example, have a high penetration rate of these eID cards, allowing the development of more citizen services.

There are also steadily developing needs across the continent for KYC (Know Your Customer) enrolment for banking and telecom services. Border control is increasingly relying on electronic modern eID documents which require half page scanners. Elections require efficient citizen authentication performed with eID document readers.

Elyctis Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal, is managed by Aminou Garba, who brings multinational high-tech experience in projects in finance, digitisation and IT. The subsidiary already has development plans to deliver more services to local markets, thanks to hiring more African staff, in order to become a significant economic player in Senegal.

Headquartered in Pertuis, France, Elyctis already has a strong international presence, with extensive international coverage and eID reader references worldwide.

IDEMIA Sale Moves Closer

One of the world’s leading biometrics providers and digital identity system integrators, IDEMIA, is up for sale, with a reported price-tag of €6 billion.

A memo on the prospective sale has been sent to potential candidates by Advent, which owns a majority stake in IDEMIA, according to French language publication Les Echos.

Advent recently enlisted Goldman Sachs to put together a financing package for a prospective deal, and the new report suggests that Rothschild is also involved.

IDEMIA was created by Advent through the €1.15 billion purchase of Oberthur Technologies in 2011, and the €2.4 billion acquisition of Safran Identity in 2016.

The company has annual turnover of €2.6 billion and an EBITDA of €550 million, both well up from a year earlier, leading to speculation that it will be valued at between €5 and €6 billion.

The Les Echos report notes that analysts consider biometrics a higher-growth area, and therefore worth more multiples than, say, IDEMIA’s payments business. Selling both sides of the business as a package could take rival and potential buyer Thales out of the running, analysts say, due to likely challenges from competition regulators.

Private equity firms Veritas and CVC are rumoured as prospective suitors, along with Apollo and Brookfield, both of which have come up before as potential buyers. Should Advent split the company, NEC, Sweden’s Assa Abloy, or its American subsidiary HID Global could join Thales as bidders, according to the report.

NEC Announces 10- Year Agreement

NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a provider and integrator of advanced IT, communications, and networking solutions has announced that its Integra-ID5™ Multimodal Biometric Identification System (MBIS) has been renewed for acceptance by the Western Identification Network (WIN), a consortium of western US states and local law enforcement agencies.

The contract for the implementation of this system will ensure identification and investigation reliability as a service through to 2032.

The WIN network consists of a shared MBIS processing service bureau that provides the ability to search the criminal and civil biometrics records of its eight member states, including interfaces to other neighbouring states, and law enforcement agencies.

In addition to the current capabilities of the system, other services provided will include:

Upgrading the legacy ABIS 2.0 (Integra- ID®4) to the new ABIS 3.0 (Integra-ID®5), which provides increased scalability and a secure, quick method of storing, retrieving, and managing biometric records.

Data migration and conversion, including deduplication of 28 million records and search of all unknown latent images. The data conversion process also included searching 52,000 unknown latent images, resulting in 2,043 latent hits, including 149 homicide cases.

Automating lights-out latent processing transactions, which achieves a 41% hit rate without operator intervention, providing opportunities for latent examiners to focus more on high-profile crimes.

A new search capability for the FBI Interstate Photo System to identify more offenders and solve more crimes.

NEC’s advanced biometric solutions, including face recognition and matching algorithms, are certified as a trusted leader in protecting communities and ensuring public safety.

According to the company, the National Institute of Standards and Technology matching algorithm recognition benchmarks have consistently judged that NEC’s biometric technologies have the fastest and most accurate face and fingerprint recognition algorithm and the most resilient facial recognition technologies for viewing low angles, low- resolution images and poor image quality.

TECH5 Joins the Secure Identity Alliance

TECH5, which operates in the fields of biometrics and digital identity management, has joined the Secure Identity Alliance (SIA) and become a member of the OSIA initiative for an open set of interfaces (APIs) for identity management.

‘We are delighted to participate in the Secure Identity Alliance. TECH5 fully shares SIA’s goals, supporting the provision of legal, trusted identity for all and driving the development of inclusive digital identity,’ said Rahul Parthe, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CTO of TECH5.

The OSIA initiative is governed under a formal structure including an independent OSIA Advisory Committee, with work carried out by the OSIA GitHub Community and the OSIA Working Group. These bodies have transparent and publicly available terms of reference to guide intra- and inter-committee relations.

‘One of the company’s key principles is a contribution to the development of standards and raising the level of expertise in the biometric market, and joining OSIA is an important strategic decision for TECH5,’ said Rob Haslam, TECH5’s Strategic Advisor.

Coincidentally, both TECH5 and the Secure Identity Alliance presented papers at the recent Optical & Digital Document Security Conference (17-19 June) in Prague.