In one of its biggest wins, Cross Match Technologies will supply fingerprint and iris capture devices for Mexico’s new national ID program.
Cross Match is part of a team led by Belgium-based Smartmatic, which received a $23 million contract from Mexico’s Secretariat of Governance to provide the enrollment stations for the ID project. Smartmatic will supply 2,000 PARkits units to handle the registration of fingerprints, iris, digital facial photos, and signatures of more than 100 million Mexican citizens.
Cross Match’s contribution to the enrollment kits is its L SCAN 10-print capture systems, which are currently used in the US VISIT program at airports in the U.S., and its I SCAN 2 dual iris capture system. The order includes related software. The order is the largest for the company’s I SCAN systems and overall rivals what the company has sold to the U.S. Defense Department, Jim Bell, the company’s vice president for Latin America, tells TR2.
Bell says that the eventual order could grow upwards of between 4,000 and 6,000 kits total during the next 12 to 18 months based on projected enrollment. Last summer Cross Match, as part of a Smartmatic team, won a 2,500 unit order for its L SCAN fingerprint capture equipment to upgrade the voter registration process in Bolivia.
Smartmatic beat out five other companies during the final stage for Mexico’s enrollment station win, Bell says. Biometrics providers on the other teams include Cogent Systems [COGT], SAFRAN‘s Morpho Track and Suprema. L-1 Identity Solutions [ID] withdrew from the competition, Bell says.
As part of the ID program Mexico selected NEC’s North American division to provide the Automated Fingerprint Identification System for the project. A separate component of the program is for the processing of the ID cards, which will be integrated with the finger, facial and iris biometrics.
Smartmatic is in charge of the system architecture for the enrollment kits, including laptop computers, peripherals and software. The company will also manage the training and first level support for the end users.
Cross Match says the national registry project will be the largest Mexican citizen enrollment program to date that includes biometrics. The goal is to enroll 110 million citizens beginning in the first quarter of 2010 and lasting about three years.