The personal identity market is rapidly growing and could be worth 7.5 billion euros ($10.61 billion) in 2014, according to a report.

The latest Pira International study (February 2010) on the market for personal identity technology predicted an annual increase of around 12 per cent over seven years, reaching €7.5 billion in 2014.

Meanwhile, Eurosmart forecast that 225 million electronic identity documents will be delivered in the world this year, which represents an increase of 18 per cent compared to 2010.

Since 2004, there has been a steady increase in the number of first generation biometric passports, complying with ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) norms, being issued. At the end of 2010, more than 250 million documents of this type had been delivered in more than 75 countries throughout the world.

Canada remains the only developed country to have deferred, once again, its plan to issue this type of document whereas China began its first trials at the beginning of the year.

The case of national identity cards is a little more mixed. The launch of the biggest biometric census project in the world in India in 2010, aiming to provide more than a billion Indians with a unique identification number (UID), came at the same time as Britain abandoned, for political and financial reasons, its national identity card project, despite the fact that it had been set out in the 2006 "Identity Cards Act".

This also corresponded to the launch of the German national identity card (80 million contactless cards to be rolled out) and to the announcement of a parliamentary bill in France to launch a contact and contactless identity card, corresponding, like the German card, to the European IAS (Identification Authentication Signature) specifications.

More recently, Turkey announced that it was in the final stages of developing a national identity card (75 million cards and over 100,000 biometric readers to be rolled out over 5 years), henceforth compliant with the European IAS standards rather than the American NIST (National Institute of Standardisation and Technology) technical recommendations which it followed for its first version.

Despite political vicissitudes with which national identity card projects are certainly faced, the global market is growing rapidly and at a pace with e-passports, said the study.

All the key players in the industry (Gemalto, Morpho, Oberthur Technologies, Giesecke & Devrient, Smartrac, ASK, etc.) have been reporting an increase in activity in the personal identity sector over the past two or three years, often in double figures. The latter now increasingly includes company cards for IAM (Identity Access Management) applications.

Issues related to this sector will be discussed at the Cartes & IDentification show from November 15 to 17 at Paris-Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre in France. – TradeArabia News Service