Key Developments

In September 2023, Mastercard (a global technology company in the payments industry, connecting billions of accounts, millions of merchants, and countless devices) launched an in-car payment partnership with Mercedes-Benz (a leading global luxury automotive manufacturer with a presence in over 200 countries and regions) aimed at Mercedes drivers in Germany. The collaboration will allow Mercedes customers to use the fingerprint sensor integrated into their vehicle's MBUX infotainment system to make secure digital payments at over 3,600 service stations across Germany, eliminating the need for cash, cards, or mobile devices during the fueling process.
In May 2023, Samsung Display (a global leader in innovative display technologies, providing cutting-edge OLED and LCD panels for smartphones, tablets, laptops, monitors, and TVs) unveiled a groundbreaking advancement in biometric technology at the Society for Information Display's (SID) Display Week 2023 conference in Los Angeles. The company showcased its Sensor OLED Display, which embeds a light-sensing organic photodiode directly within the panel structure, eliminating the need for separate sensor modules beneath the display. This innovative approach allows for a sleeker, more seamless design while enabling advanced biometric authentication capabilities like in-display fingerprint scanning and iris recognition on OLED screens. Samsung Display's Sensor OLED Display represents a significant step forward in integrating biometrics into mobile devices without compromising the display experience.
In April 2023, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the government agency responsible for implementing the Aadhaar unique identification number program in India, partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), a premier public engineering and research institution, to develop a robust touchless biometric capture system for fingerprints. The partners plan to develop this contactless fingerprint capture technology with built-in liveness detection to support biometric authentication as an alternative to face recognition. The system, which will be designed to work on common mobile phones for a convenient user experience, will capture multiple fingers simultaneously to maximize accuracy. Once developed, this touchless fingerprint authentication capability will be integrated into the larger Aadhaar ecosystem, allowing users to authenticate their identity without physical contact with a fingerprint scanner, similar to how face authentication is currently done.
In February 2023, IDloop (a Germany-based startup founded in 2021 by experts in biometrics, optics, and programming with the goal of revolutionizing biometric data capture) developed a contactless 3D fingerprint scanner with microscopic resolution. The company pitched its novel biometric technology as a way to quickly compare fingerprints against the over three billion people already registered in existing government fingerprint databases, which were collected using contact-based scanners. IDloop's optical scanner captures fingerprints with 10-micrometer resolution in a fraction of a second, significantly speeding up the matching process while providing a more secure and hygienic alternative to traditional contact-based fingerprint scanning.