FacePhi has been able to maintain all of its primary business operations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The facial recognition specialist has been able to advance all of its business and R&D initiatives, including the implementation of biometric authentication technology at the Kangbuk Samsung Hospital in Seoul, South Korea.

The Kangbuk deployment came about through its pre-existing partnership with the Korean company NSSMART. The hospital will use facial recognition to verify the identity of patients, thereby negating the need for those patients to carry a medical card or a registration number. The technology is expected to reduce fraud in the healthcare industry. The automated process will also lower the costs of printing cards and allow the hospital to provide better patient care.

Thanks to the NSSMART partnership (and others like it), FacePhi CEO Javier Mira believes that COVID-19 will not have a substantial impact on the company’s core business. 

“None of our projects has been paralyzed or canceled. Everything continues as planned,” said Mira. “We are fully operational. Our staff continues to implement projects and we attend both investors and clients through online meetings as we have always done.”

Mira indicated that the company is still looking to expand, and is moving forward with its plans to hire new talent in its marketing and Research & Development departments. He credited FacePhi’s growing international presence – including its new APAC subsidiary in South Korea – for its stability during the pandemic.

FacePhi noted that COVID-19 has not yet disrupted its business operations even though many of its clients are based in the financial sector. That could reflect the current interest in contactless biometric authentication options. FacePhi has provided selfie-based onboarding solutions for multiple financial institutions in Latin America, and added Santander Argentina and Credicorp to its client list in the first two months of 2020.

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)