FB

Can you please provide our readers with a brief background of the company?

GB

Green Bit SpA was established back in 1989 developing electronic boards. In 1997 Green Bit started to focus on fingerprint biometrics developing its first access control and Time & Attendance products. At this point we had all necessary technologies to build high quality forensic fingerprint scanners in house: optics, electronics, mechanics and certainly software. Thus from 2001 on we decided to develop Visascan3 answering a big tender from the Italian police. In the end due to our flexibility in responding to Police requirements, we were able to win and have supplied several hundred Visascan3 units for Immigrant Registration.

FB

You provide a wide range of products for the Law Enforcement and Civil ID Industry. Can you please tell us about your product line-up?

GB

Our product line-up is divided into two groups, one group contains all our fingerprint modules available in desktop or OEM version, the second group includes custom products where we combine our fingerprint modules with other standard devices, i.e. smartcard readers, RFID readers, flatbed scanners, signature pads etc. Our fingerprint modules, named DactyScan, range from our entry model: DactyScan26, a PIV and BSI certified 1" x 1" single fingerprint scanner used mainly in Civil ID and Border Control projects; following we have FBI certified DactyScan40, a 1.6" x 1.6" rolled and simultaneous 2-plane fingerprint scanner, used in the field of e-ID Document issuing and in Law Enforcement for inmate identification; DactyScan84 is our latest arrival to the family: a 3.2" x 3.0" 4-slap scanner, FBI certified with several SDK configurations in order to satisfy every customer request from Law Enforcement and Civil ID market; finally we have DactyScan127, a FBI certified 5" x 5" palm scanner. Regarding our "Custom products" I will briefly outline two products that demonstrate very well Green Bit’s strength in fast development of customized products: VisaScan3, combining our rolled scanner, our palm scanner plus a static photo-scanner, has been developed especially for a tender from the Italian police. Another important example is Scan-IDe40, the product that won the Spanish tender for the National eID card.

FB

Recently you started a lot of abroad activities including the opening of subsidiaries. Can you tell us more?

GB

Having developed a full product range and given the various emerging possibilities in the biometric industry worldwide, starting in 2006 we established a global network of sales agents and partnerships enabling us to participate in highly promising markets such as the US, Latin America and SE Asia. Therefore in January 2007 we opened a subsidiary in Washington, DC and a sales office in Buenos Aires to further promote our presence overseas. On September 1st we established Green Bit Kazakhstan in JV with the local Ministry of Trade and Industry to strengthen our presence in this very interesting and promising central Asian region.

FB

Green Bit just won the tender to supply the system for data acquisition for new electronic ID CARD in Spain. Please tell us about this.

GB

As already underlined above, our ability to develop "Custom products", even on short notice, guaranteed our victory in this tender together with our partners Siemens and Informatica El Corte Ingles. Scan-IDe40 was brought to the first prototype within three weeks after we saw the tender document for the first time. Strictly following a user friendly approach, we developed an integrated device using our rolled fingerprint scanner, a flatbed scanner to scan photo and signature and a combined RFID and smart card module. This made Scan-IDe40 the best choice for this project as we offered a product that was able to perform every task requested and at the same time already prepared for future tasks. During a very tough test period within the Police offices, Scan-IDe40 was able to outperform the competition and convince the technical committee of the Spanish Police.

FB

What do you see as the greatest challenge to the Biometric Industry today?

GB

The greatest challenge will still remain standardization and interoperability. Therefore Green Bit decided to adopt the BioAPI 2.0 Ten Print Extension framework for Dactyscan84 with the strong belief that this will facilitate significantly integration and adoption of biometrics not only by the established system integrators and solution providers but especially by IT companies that are entering the market attracted by the various and promising biometric ID card projects around the globe. Nevertheless there is still a lot of work to be done; this is especially true for commercial markets where standardization and interoperability is absolutely needed for large scale international implementations like biometric enabled ATMs or POS.

FB

As a global player, where are you seeing the greatest growth in the biometric space?

GB

Without a doubt for the next years Civil ID projects like e-ID cards, e-Passports and e-Driver licenses will determine the growth in our industry giving an enormous boost to fingerprint and face recognition industry. But with upcoming NGI by FBI, Iris will come into play as well as some new standards regarding image quality that industry will have to cope with. This certainly will become very interesting from a hardware point of view as we will transit from 500dpi to 1000dpi fingerprint scanners. Further significant growth will be generated from the commercial market as acceptance for biometrics keeps growing especially when used to reduce risk of identity fraud. For example we see enormous opportunities in the Financial transaction (ATM, Remote Banking, POS) and in high level IT Security applications.

FB

Has this been a good year for the company?

GB

2007 is the year of a real growth for Green Bit. During this year we established a commercial presence in many Countries, we have completed our product portfolio with state-of-the-art products fully certified by FBI, we have started new leading edge projects based on our technologies that will give us new boost for several years, and last, but not least, we grew significantly from a revenue point of view maintaining a very good positive EBITDA. We see the positive trend over the past 4 years continuing well into the future for Green Bit!

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