The most promising developments of 2025 for biometrics providers were largely found in the kind of incremental progress that is better for contracts than sensational reporting. The progress in established markets, from law enforcement to financial services, was real and steady, leading Biometric Update to publish 3784 articles in total over the course of the year. They included dozens of feature interviews with leaders in digital identity, both in print and on the Biometric Update Podcast, along with 80 guest posts from industry insiders and 4 market reports co-written with leading analyst firm and consultancy Goode Intelligence.
Biometrics applications that were novel uses or emerging markets in 2024, like age assurance, entered the land-rush phase in 2025. Know-your-agent (KYA) is among the nominees for the same role in the year ahead. In terms of explosive news, age checks and AI were the two areas of the market providing the most fuel.
But in many areas the year ended up demanding patience; for digital IDs and wallets to be issued, accepted and used, for border systems to come online, for fraud protections to catch up to sophisticated cybercriminals. It was also a year in which the UK and U.S. governments provoked fears around surveillance and centralized control that threaten to undermine industry efforts to promote responsible biometrics development, deployment, and data use.
The year began with trepidation about the impact of deepfakes and generative AI on fraud, leading to the first wave of biometric injection attack detection (IAD) assessments. The evaluations, based on the European standard being used as the starter for an ISO standard, are now performed by several biometrics testing labs.
The “2025 Deepfake Detection Market Report and Buyer’s Guide,” one of four market reports published this year by Biometric Update and Goode Intelligence, forecasts deepfake detection to grow from just over $1.5 billion in revenue this year to over $4.9 billion by 2027.
IDs for non-human entities, whether bots, AI agents or businesses gained traction this year, to guard against automated fraud and mollify regulators. Actions like the UK’s Companies House requiring identity verification for businesses coincided with supply chain concerns and GLEIF’s advancing work on vLEIs.
Conversation at March’s MOSIP Connect 2025 in Manilla, Philippines largely revolved around expanding digital public infrastructure to make national digital IDs useful for people. Biometric Update covered efforts spanning from integrations with systems like OpenG2P to hackathons targeting specific applications from live on location.
DPI and hackathons were also major parts of ID4Africa’s 2025 AGM in Adiss Ababa, Ethiopia, held in May. But the overall theme was one of uneven progress, with a new data tool quantifying the disparity that was evident in the presentations by officials from nearly all African nations. Those catching up must learn from their neighbors, but the quality of the lessons has undeniably improved.
Age verification and facial age estimation took on greater prominence in 2025, as expected. The UK’s Online Safety Act coming into force and the completion of Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial were already hot topics when the Global Age Assurance Standards Summit kicked off in April, but what the Summit made clear was that a drumbeat of policy decisions aimed at applying the age restrictions of the physical world to the internet was about to begin.
Now that social media companies have joined pornographers as the targets of restrictions, the volume of the arguments on this topic will increase in 2026.
UK police continued to pioneer live facial recognition use in public, for better or for worse. The ongoing story followed a predictable path this year until a transparency push accompanying the latest expansion plan revealed the PND has been using an algorithm from Cognitec a half decade and several versions older than the latest update, with known demographic disparities confirmed by the NPL.
The UK has also been more enthusiastic in its embrace of retail biometrics for crime prevention than most countries, but Australia and New Zealand each held public dialogue on the topic this year, and more deployments are expected in the year ahead.
A proposal for a UK national ID system landed like a cautionary tale in communication management. PM Kier Starmer announced it as an immigration-reduction measure, in the immediate wake of a think tank invoking “Britcards,” and followed that up by announcing a government-owned competitor to the country’s private sector identity and attribute providers. Since then, the government has been defending the policy, clarifying what it means by “mandatory,” and how it will avoid crushing a domestic growth industry it has been nurturing.
By the end of the year, the ADVP and Tony Blair Institute engaged in a civil debate between on the relative roles of the government and DIATF-certified identity service providers on the Biometric Update podcast. They found some common ground, but also laid bare areas of clear division the upcoming public consultation is sure to return to.
The EU ran a series of large-scale pilots for its digital identity wallets, one of several ways in which digital wallets had a successful year, albeit more quietly than might have been expected. EUDI Wallets are supposed to be ready in 2026, but experts doubt they will be interoperable.
The bloc did manage to begin implementing its EES biometric border control system, though it might have helped itself with stronger support for the Travel to Europe app. Work continued in Europe and around the world on digital travel credentials. The UK will include DTCs in its next passport deal. Companies like SITA are stitching DTCs into a larger ecosystem that extends throughout the travel experience, while technology providers like Vision-Box moving beyond e-gates with concepts like biometric corridors, even as most airports continue to play catch-up. And deployments at U.S. airports gathered pace in 2025, with the launch of EPP biometrics provided by iProov.
America’s overhauled border protection system now operates throughout the country, with contracts for “bounty hunter AI agents” and the Mobile Fortify facial recognition app farmed out to ICE by CBP. The blanket of surveillance expanding across the U.S. includes residential and traffic cameras from the likes of Ring and Flock.
Please tell us if you see any podcasts, online seminars or other content we should pass along to those in biometrics and the digital identity community, either in the comments below or through social media.
