The South African Police Service has released a tender to the market for biometric technology equipment, which has bore a lot of controversy for the domestic biometric technology market.
Well, at least that is what executive management at Ideco thinks. Ideco is an established leader in the application of biometric technology and Southern Africa’s primary distributor of Morpho fingerprint biometric solutions.
The managing Director for Ideco,Marius Coetzee, believes that the level of instruction and direction within the tender is on equivalence with anything that would be released at global law enforcement agencies such as Scotland Yard or the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).
He specified the fact that the tender would ensure a chain of evidence that could be used as indisputable proof of an identity.
“The SA industry needs to realize that few biometric solutions operate totally in isolation. At some point it needs to interface to SAPS for criminal record checks or to the DHA for online fingerprint verification or to other legacy systems for identity clearing. If industry solutions do not comply with these minimum standards the civil systems would simply reject it,” said the MD.
The tender defines that biometric solutions must comply with various elements, including quality of fingerprint images as specified by the FBI and endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), biometric information management as specified by FIPS 201 and South Africa’s SABS under SANS 19785, as well as biometric information interoperability as specified by SABS under SANS 19794.
“It is important to note that the local industry seldom considers any standards. Procurements are based on features or functionality and looks, only to realize in court that the evidence render useless. In many cases the industry is also mislead about standards because suppliers simply do not understand the relevance of certain standards,” Coetzee adds.
As the primary distributor of Morpho biometric readers and exclusive support and repair centre for Morpho in South Africa, Ideco is using its leadership position in the market to back its partners in their response to the tender.