The Home Office has selected IBM for the provision of a new biometrics matcher platform and associated services.
They have agreed on a five-year contract, with options to run for up to three more, valued at £65.6 million under the Home Office Biometrics (HOB) team’s programme to deliver a core platform for biometric matching and identification.
According to the contract award notice, the platform will comprise a matcher service bus (MSB) for biometric transaction processing logic, workflow rules, integration of matching engine software (MES) and a service interface; and the infrastructure platform to provide the computing capacity for MSB and MES operations.
An accounting officer assessment of the HOB programme says the platform will initially provide a capability for facial matching, fingerprints and DA, and should be able to incorporate other biometrics such as voice and iris recognition.
Borders and justice
It will be used by the Migration and Borders Group in visa, immigration, asylum and passport applications, border control, and in criminal justice for bail, police vetting, exclusions and victim identification.
This is reflected in a programme to bring together the IDENT 1 fingeprint system used by policy and justice agencies, and the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System (IABS) under a contract agreed in 2019 between the Home Office and Leidos.
Integration of both platforms is included in the stages of the project to deliver the new matcher platform.
