The Next Big Opportunity for Investors will be Biometric Companies Designed with DEIA

This article first appeared on Nasdaq.com.

In June 2023, Apple officially rolled out Live Speech and Personal Voice for people who have speech impairments. With Live Speech technology, a user can type what they want to say and have it spoken out loud to others. In addition, Personal Voice creates a voice that sounds like you by recording 15 minutes of a user’s random phrases. Together, Live Speech and Personal Voice are a godsend to people with ALS, throat cancer or other conditions that impact speech by saving and mimicking their voices before their condition progresses.

In another move designed to simplify access to services, in October of this year, Amazon rolled out Passkeys, allowing Amazon customers to use the same face, fingerprint, or PIN to unlock their device to access their Amazon services. The primary goal? Make it universally easier and more secure for Amazon customers to access their Amazon accounts while avoiding the hassle and complexity of passwords.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) is motivated by a desire for equality in the workplace as well as the marketplace. As technology capabilities from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have expanded and innovated, biometrics have emerged as a critical foundation of their DEIA-focused services and features. In many ways, DEIA and biometrics are growing increasingly intertwined. This means that biometric solutions must be inherently designed to align with and support DEIA.

Biometrics is an exciting and burgeoning space, becoming more widely accepted and increasingly ubiquitous as a form of authentication. While passwords may still be the most common form of online authentication, biometrics are rapidly catching up. In the digital banking sector, for example, more than half of all consumers who have used biometrics prefer that method over passwords, making it the more popular option.

But biometrics can be murky territory in that processes that used to be performed by a human (asserting and certifying the identity of individuals) are now being done by computers, leaving little margin for error. In the past, certain biometric modalities like facial recognition have been criticized for promoting bias; that is, not being as accurate in matching or distinguishing the facial morphologies of certain groups of individuals. However, with the advent of DEIA, investors looking at the biometrics space should consider the extent to which the providers incorporate DEIA into their solutions, which would largely eliminate this issue. Some questions to ask include:

Does the provider support multiple biometric modalities?

While fingerprinting remains the most widely accepted and used biometric modality, it’s important to offer multiple modality options to support individuals with varying accessibility needs. The biometric companies poised to emerge as leaders will offer a broad range of modalities (face, voice, iris, fingerprints, etc.) with the same levels of excellence.

Is the provider trained on the most diverse data sets possible, providing an in-built mechanism against discrimination?

The best, most comprehensive algorithms are trained on the most diverse data sets in the world comprising various races, ethnicities, nationalities and genders. Top-performing biometric algorithms are over 99 percent accurate across a variety of demographics, resulting in bias-proofed systems that are delivering “close to perfect” performance with miss rates averaging a mere 0.1 percent.  Remember that DEIA is about making services universally easy to access, so if a service is going to be biometrics-enabled, it cannot make it more challenging for one set of individuals to access the services as compared to another.

Is the provider intentional about democratizing access to biometric technology?

It used to be that only large, established companies could afford to implement biometrics due to the extensive up-front time and work involved in implementation and maintenance. DEIA-focused providers will adopt a business model that democratizes access to biometrics, eradicating barriers and ultimately making biometrics available to a much wider range of businesses and, ultimately, users. For example, a provider may offer cloud-based offerings, low code and no code solutions, developer resources and a solid enabled partner network to bring biometrics into the realm of possibility for even smaller businesses.

Perhaps most importantly, providers must be adept at effectively balancing ease of use, a core premise of DEIA, with superior security – giving everyone the secure, safe, highly convenient online experiences they deserve. As the links between DEIA and biometrics continue to grow, investors will want to keep a keen eye on providers that don’t just “talk the talk,” but “walk the walk”” – and in doing so, may reap excellent rewards.