CEO Today Europe Awards

81 www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today Europe Awards 2018 the united kingdom eradicated. Where the ATMs have the iris reader, the user knows for sure that this is a trusted ATM, the bank knows for sure that the person withdrawing the cash is verified and entitled to do so and the payment is made securely. Additionally, this facility provides dignity and financial inclusion to unbanked refugees. If you are displaced and verified as needing assistance, your access to cash can be exactly the same as someone who has a traditional bank account. No additional buttons to press, no aid queue to join. It’s simple and self-respecting. What are some of the key challenges that IrisGuard faces? I would say that the biggest challenge we face is the misconceptions around iris recognition technology, from questions about its safety (no, it doesn’t use lasers!) through to speed and accuracy, we’ve been asked them all and nothing fazes us. We are always highly amused at what some movie screenwriters would have you believe is possible by either using someone else’s eye or transplanting an iris, because it’s simply not possible. The iris is an involuntary muscle, so removing it would simply make it retract and therefore unreadable. Likewise, the IrisGuard imagers cannot be fooled by photographs, contact lenses or even 3D fake eyes. Even people who’ve had Lasik eye surgery can still be scanned and identified accurately. We can say with surety that with IrisGuard platforms it is not possible to cheat the system, and the hundreds of millions of iris records processed without a single error proves just that. There is a huge amount of hype in the iris recognition and wider biometrics industries, making an end user think their payment is secure because it’s been authenticated by a fingerprint or facial recognition on their mobile phone. This is something we want to tackle head on and overcome with our future products. There is a real human element to your technology, please explain. With 2.5 billion people across the world without access to traditional banking services, there will always be a demand for dignified, secure, iris-enabled payments. Ensuring that the vulnerable, needy and impoverished can move towards financial inclusion through the simple use of their most secure biometric – their iris – is what drives IrisGuard each day, every day. When drive for excellence that has allowed us to lead the way; the first iris recognition platforms in border control, the first on ATMs, the first in supermarkets and the first iris-based Ethereum blockchain. Some entrepreneurs enter the sector thinking that it’s as simple as packaging together cameras and software, but it’s so much more than that. IrisGuard is the only in-house designed and built end-to-end solution of a complete financial authentication and authorisation system integrating hardware, software and server processing. It is completely fit for purpose and outperforms anything packaged from individual, standalone items. Our long- standing, robust 24/7 installations and partnerships attest to this fact. You describe your hardware as “secure financial delivery platforms”. Please explain what this means. In the world of transactions and payments, there are two elements. The first is that you trust the company handling the payment and the second is that the payment is secure. So for example, if you go to withdraw cash from an ATM, you trust the bank and that the ATM you are using is secure. You trust that the cash delivered is real, that your card details will not be skimmed and shared or used to deliver cash to anyone else without your approval. In return, they trust that you are the card holder and are able to make the withdrawal. One of the issues with this model is the level of trust needed from each side because neither can be 100% certain that the other is who they say they are. But what if you could verify the identity of the person withdrawing the cash? What if you could be 100% certain that the transaction was being made by the card holder, the registered account holder? With the use of IrisGuard technologies, the trust and security issues are completely urban refugee withdrawing cash with her iris © UNHCR Q Q Q www.irisguard.com