The end of June has brought news of the biometrics industry’s latest big merger: IDnow has entered into an agreement to acquire ARIADNEXT.
Based in Germany, IDnow is one of the providers of selfie-based biometric onboarding technology that have benefitted from growing demand in recent years, and particularly in the wake of a pandemic that has driven even more business into online and mobile channels. These solutions generally use facial recognition to match end users’ selfie photos to images of their official identity documents.
ARIADNEXT, based in France, also offers a selfie identity verification solution, featuring BioID liveness detection technology. The company added NFC support to its mobile Software Development Kit earlier this year, enabling third party apps to communicate with the chips embedded in newer passports and other identity documents.
In a statement announcing the merger plans, the companies asserted that IDnow has seen a 200 percent increase in the use of its solutions over the past year, and that ARIADNEXT has seen a 130 percent increase over the last five years. The merger will see these companies combine their platforms, extending their reach across the French, German, and United Kingdom markets; and applications of the platform will extend from remote onboarding to Point-of-Sale identity verification.
“The combination with ARIADNEXT is an important step towards our vision of building the pan-European leader for identity verification-as-a-service solutions,” said IDnow CEO Andreas Bodczek, adding later that “IDnow can provide our customers with an even broader suite of products through a single platform with a seamless user experience.”
ARIADNEXT President Guillaume Despagne, for his part, emphasized that the combined company will already have “a strong presence in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, and Romania” from the outset.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, nor has a timeline been set for the merger; but the companies have indicated that IDnow will retain ARIADNEXT’s full staff of 125 employees across offices in Bucharest, Iasi, Madrid, Paris, Rennes, and Warsaw.
(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)
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