The secret sauce to successful biometric applications like Apple Pay by Babak Goudarzi Pour

I think Touch ID and Apple Pay are the finest examples of successful biometric implementations. Apple Pay early adoption rate is impressive: 1% of digital payment dollars during the month of November. And note it is available only on the newest iPhone and iPads and supported by a few, but a growing list of, merchants.

The secret sauce in successful biometric implementations is made of many ingredients. Clearly beyond the scope of this article. But here is one of the main ingredients: it is to see the performance from the end-user perspective! It is a method that is gaining momentum also in the network and infrastructure management world. Operational analytics simply means to measure and analyze a set of fundamental metrics and properties in order to improve future products and maintain the ones in use.

I had an opportunity to present our product and pitch the benefits of operational analytics to one of my Apple contacts at a biometric conference. No surprise there; what I pitched was rigorously performed by Apple prior to the launch of Touch ID on iPhone 5s thanks to a large number of own testers at Apple. I know many people who still and continuously contribute to improvement of Touch ID and Apple Pay by simply sending back an automated and anonymized feedback to Apple. I can imagine that feedback contains meaningful device and algorithm related metrics for making sense of performance data in order to know what to improve in future products.

We are standardizing the interface for capturing and making sense of operational metrics and properties for various biometric applications such as Physical Access Control and Automated Border/Passport Control eGates. We lead this work via OASIS-Open who is the organization behind the first standards for web services based biometric devices and Internet of Things.
Babak Goudarzipour
Optimum Biometric Labs

*Info on Apple Pay comes from Market Info reflecting on report from the industry intelligence company ITG.

*My iPhone 5 still performs well but becoming an Apple Pay user is intriguing because I think it is about time to get rid of all the plastic cards.

Babak Goudarzi Pour | December 23, 2014 at 9:58 pm | Tags: ABC eGates, analytics, biometric devices, Internet of Things, IoT, m2m, OASIS, Physical Access Control applications, Web services | Categories: Opinions and Reflections | URL: http://wp.me/p1JEyG-v7