BioCon Brazil Reveals How the Spread of Biometrics in South America Has Improved All Walks of Life

From criminal use to the financial sector to football admissions, biometrics is taking hold in South America at a rapid pace

The first BioCon conference beyond European borders, BioCon Brazil, has attracted more visitors than we expected. Over two days we welcomed our partners and explained the practical uses of our technologies in varied situations, which include criminal identification in the US, making roll calls at schools easier, and preventing fraud at football stadiums.

The opening keynote by Professor Ramon Santos Fernandez, a federal police fingerprint expert, has shown how the technology has transformed police work and investigation. “Thanks to biometrics,” he says, “the police are now able to solve many more cases, and faster than ever.”

Although BioCon Brazil has demonstrated many uses of biometric technology in police work (such as contactless fingerprints used for on-the-go identification by the US police of Albany, NY), it is far from the only sector benefiting from high-performance biometrics.

Examples by the largest Brazilian integrator Topaz and certification authority Certisign have highlighted the fact that users can now use biometrics to verify their identity even in high-security environments such as the financial sector or trusted legal signing.

There were more use cases to be shown with successful deployment in Brazil: in over 1,600 schools, biometrics is used by teachers to replace roll calls, “saving about 10 minutes of every lesson,” and in the Palmeiras stadium, where it “makes entering faster, increasing speed of admission from 7 people a minute to eighteen a minute.” The new system also cut down fraud and ticket resales to virtually zero. You can watch all the presentations here.

With the success of the first BioCon, we are planning to make similar conferences for our partners on other continents as well.