IDEX Biometrics Receives Initial Order From Smart Card Manufacturer

IDEX Biometrics has received an initial order for IDEX Pay, its biometric solution designed for metal cards, from a smart card manufacturing partner in Asia.

The partner, who was not identified in the release, will deploy biometric metal payment cards for its bank clients worldwide, IDEX Biometrics said in a Wednesday (Nov. 22) press release.

The unnamed partner has an annual production capacity of more than 30 million cards, specializes in serving banks globally with a full suite of metal cards and is certified by major payment schemes, according to the release. It will release the first cards produced from this order to customers in the first quarter of 2024.

“Bringing true innovation to the affluent customers banking segment will accelerate biometric metal card market penetration,” IDEX Biometrics Chief Commercial Officer Catharina Eklof said in the release.

With this partnership, the smart card manufacturer will meet the growing demand for metal cards among premium customers in Europe, Latin America and Asia, according to the press release.

IDEX Biometrics offers authentication solutions like fingerprint biometrics for the payments, access control and digital identity sectors, the release said.

Together with supplying the technology for biometric metal cards, IDEX Biometrics provides its manufacturing partners with product and implementation guidelines, per the release.

“Premium banking customers seek seamless payments solution when traveling and in their daily lives,” Eklof said in the release. “Smoother payments contribute to transaction and retention increase, critical to banks in today’s competitive payment landscape.”

Biometric payment cards promise to improve the card user experience by enabling consumers to validate a payment transaction with a single press of their finger, Michel Roig, president of payment and access at Swedish biometric company Fingerprint Cards, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in March.

“You’re just adding your finger to the sensor, you tap and pay and off you go … It’s an improvement [from standard contactless cards] and that’s why we call it contactless 2.0,” Roig said.

Legacy methods of authentication are increasingly giving way to biometric authentication that is more intuitive, seamless and secure, Entersekt Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder Dewald Nolte told PYMNTS in an interview posted on Nov. 15.

“People are getting used to logging into their favorite apps on their smartphones using biometrics daily, and using Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay and those kinds of wallets using biometrics to activate that payment, it is fairly well adopted in the market,” Nolte said.