The CEO of EyeVerify sees validation in the emergence of iris scanning in Samsung’s latest flagship device. In a blog post on the company’s website, Toby Rush revisits his “Fingers and Eyes” prediction from February of last year that these would offer the primary modalities for user-friendly, secure biometric authentication on mobile devices.

It was a prediction based on the logical premise that the primary ways in which we interact with our smartphones are touching them and looking at them. (Though “we’ll even talk on them” once in a while, Rush notes.) Now, fingerprint scanners are expected to become standard features on all smartphones by the end of 2018, and one of the world’s biggest smartphone brands has announced a new iris scanning device—the Samsung Galaxy Note7, which retains the fingerprint scanner of other recent Samsung devices, pointing to a future in which smartphones leverage both modalities.

It’s a big step toward Rush’s vision, but given that the Note7 is a high-end device, iris scanning is still a long way from the near-ubiquity of fingerprint scanning. That’s where a solution like EyeVerify’s Eyeprint ID could help to push things forward: Based on eye vein scanning, the system is entirely software driven, meaning it could potentially be deployed on a range of smartphones. Having generated some considerable buzz in the FinTech community over the past year, it’s now being adopted by major interests like Alipay, Visa, and Wells Fargo. As Rush explains, “we are reassured with the knowledge that software eats hardware;” for him, the Note7’s iris scanning represents not a rival technology but a sign that eye-scanning solutions like Eyeprint ID are ready to take off in the mobile market.

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)