Looking to expand its reach beyond its traditional law enforcement and government markets, Cross Match Technologies has created a venture unit that is looking for industry partners to quickly bring biometric and identity management solutions to commercial markets while still keeping in mind the company’s legacy customers.
Cross Match Ventures, which was announced last week and begins business this week, has already generated an “overwhelming response” from potential industry partners to combine their respective technologies and is developing relationships with a “couple” of partners to bring solutions to market, Glenn Hickok, president of Cross Match Ventures and the company’s former head of Global Sales, tells HSR.
Hickok says the new business will aim to bring end-to-end solutions to markets in months rather than years. Cross Match Ventures will take advantage of Cross Match’s core strength in sensor development and design, and then team with application providers who are already entrenched in emerging markets and others that know how to market to these sectors to go after opportunities faster, he says.
Potential markets include electronic health care, the financial sector, school safety and visitor management, and even cyber security, he says. Hickok adds that he’s willing to consider partnerships to go after government project funding depending on the capabilities being sought.
Hickok says he is most excited about some of the larger opportunities such as electronic healthcare reform as well as leveraging ongoing investments by some nations in national ID systems, such as India, that are aimed at ensuring their citizens receive the benefits they are entitled to. This might entail “developing a joint venture with companies that have expertise in payment systems, that have expertise in that software layer, and then have distribution into a retail market,” he says.
Product solutions may be around biometric payment, transaction authentication, and business intelligence, Hickok says.
Many of the potential business opportunities that Cross Match Ventures is considering are not new, such as biometric authentication for retail payments, Hickok says. “Others have tried and failed in the past but I think the market dynamic is changing,” he says.
Last summer Apple [APPL] acquired AuthenTec, a company that provides fingerprint sensors and identity management solutions to help protect networks and mobile devices. Hickok says that commercial adoption and acceptance of biometrics creates a critical mass that increases the likelihood that the timing is right for these capabilities to enter the wider marketplace.
For now Hickok says his ventures unit is a “start up business” with a small staff that needs to “flesh out the business case” for the existing opportunities.