A Billion Fingerprint Readers in Mobile Devices by 2021

According to Tractica, more than one-third of all mobile devices will have fingerprint readers installed by 2021.

One billion mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, will be shipped globally in 2021.

Of those billion devices, 34 percent will have fingerprint readers, cementing biometrics security acceptance and adoption among global consumers.

Though there’s been a rise in varying biometric methods, such as iris-scanning, facial recognition, and voice recognition, Tractica predicts the trusty fingerprint will win out to secure mobile devices.

Fingerprint readers have become cost-effective enough to become included in several of the leading device manufacturers’ product lineups. This enables broad support for basic user identification and carrying out more secure mobile payments.

The current use case for transactional biometrics security is fairly simple.

According to Tractica principal analyst Bob Lockhart, “As penetration rates increase in the future, however, the market will expand to include a variety of additional identification and authentication use cases for banking and financial transactions, government identification, and healthcare applications, among others.”

Over the next decade, biometrics may grow to become the pillar of consumer identification for not just the financial services industry, but of society as a whole if these predictions come to fruition.