Good Help is Hard to Find

A lot of really good thinking about ID and biometrics comes out of South Africa. In the piece linked below, Marius Coetzee makes some points with which we wholeheartedly agree.

Smart IDs alone cannot tackle fraud

Marius Coetzee, MD of biometric identity control specialist Ideco, says smart identity cards will improve identification processes through the use of biometrics, but they cannot solve the identity fraud problem on their own.
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“We've been in this game for the past 10 years. We have seen companies publish tenders for solutions and spend a lot of money on a pilot, only to see poor results. Biometrics is an extremely complex science – if you implement it correctly, working with the right partners, you will see results. If you don't, you will simply waste money.”

ID management technology is a tool managers can use to make certain business processes more efficient, saving the organization money. No technology can manage a business all by itself.

And, of course, as with so many other things, a good partner can make all the difference. The problem is that the larger biometrics vendors don't really want to be that partner for any normally-sized or price sensitive organization and other organizations that could really take advantage of better ID management systems have difficulty finding the partners they need because the expertise is in small companies. Biometrics hasn't been Oracle'd, SAP'ed, Microsoftened or IBM'd, yet, and it's going to be a while before that changes.

Until then, SecurLinx is here to help.