Both are working together for the advancement of biometric card landscape.
Infineon Technologies AG, the global leader in smart card payment solutions, and IDEX Biometrics, the leading provider of advanced fingerprint identification and authentication solutions have joined forces. The two companies aim to seamlessly integrate IDEX’ biometrics technology into platforms featuring Infineon’s secure elements and will develop a system-on-card demonstrator that runs on the latest dual-interface 16-bit security controller from Infineon.
Biometric cards are expected to further reduce card fraud by introducing a simple second-factor authentication. This can be used for payment transactions and applications combining payment with social services. In addition, the fingerprint authentication compresses the overall transaction times compared to a PIN authentication. This simple tap and go significantly improve the payment experience of a user. The technical challenge of contactless biometric smart cards is their sensitive power consumption profile. Infineon’s secure elements have a big advantage to enable biometrics due to an optimized power profile in non-battery supported contactless systems as well as their outstanding contactless transaction performance. They support contactless payment transactions at significantly below 300ms, this enables a biometric payment transaction to be performed in less than one second.
Biometric data security
Biometric data is securely stored on the security controller embedded in the card. It is not uploaded into the cloud and so it quite literally stays in the hands of the user.
“We firmly believe that leveraging the expertise of Infineon and IDEX will allow us to define a sustainable path for a secure biometric ecosystem with the highest performance,” said Bjoern Scharfen, Head of the Payment & Wearables at Infineon. “Biometrics is the next innovation step for contactless payment cards, providing additional security and convenience to banks and consumers.”
“As the leading fingerprint biometrics company, we are committed to continuing growing our partner ecosystem,” explained Stan Swearingen, CEO at IDEX Biometrics. “We are delighted to collaborate closely with the highly experienced team at Infineon towards turning the biometric integration on smart cards into a seamless experience.”
