By adaptive - January 11th, 2016
Identity theft and authentication are growing concerns for companies, especially with more employees working remotely or on mobile devices. Hector Hoyos, founder and CEO of Hoyos Labs, shares with Open Mobile’s Robert Gray how the company’s proprietary platform provides these services sans user names and passwords.
OMM: How does your technology work, and what differentiates it from others in the market?
Hoyos: The founding partners at Hoyos Labs set out to solve the major problem of authentication--we carry lots of things around to identify us, but which are not us-- including keys, passwords, user names, and credit cards. Criminals have had an easy time defrauding people of hundreds of billions of dollars globally because these items are increasingly easy to copy. The world has had various forms of biometric technology, the problem has been securely implementing these amazing technologies in ways companies can actually use.
Hoyos Labs solved this problem when it created the BOPS standard, which it freely granted to the IEEE and subsequently became P2410-the Biometric Open Protocol Standard. Using this standard, companies can create and use technologies which allow people to safely and securely authenticate all kinds of transactions, everything from electronic payments, contactless ATM machines with no more user names and passwords.
In addition to the BOPS platform, we have released a new biometric called, 4F for 4 fingers.
OMM: Hoyos started as a consumer-facing company but you’ve pivoted to enterprise. Is that because the demand is greater on the enterprise side?
Hoyos: Enterprises are looking for higher levels of security beyond TouchID on iOS and username, passwords and token-based authorization on other platforms. Employees are being untethered from their offices and empowered to work anytime and anywhere but security remains a serious impediment to mobile adoption. HoyosID and 4F, connecting to BOPS (IEEE Standard) gives enterprise a level of security, authentication, convenience and user experience that has not been available in the industry with todays MDM solutions.
OMM: Financial services are a natural market for biometric authentication, but where else are you finding interest?
Hoyos: Health care, insurance, law enforcement, physical access control, general infrastructure protection and data protection
OMM: How large do you think the biometric market could become?
Hoyos: All experts and studies point to this becoming a $30 billion market by 2017.
Hoyos: Our company donated its open source platform to the IEEE, how does your company generate revenue?
Even though we contributed BOPS, we still own the IP and we’ve developed Boriken BOPS, our version of BOPS that we license to corporations.
OMM: While you’re just scaling up the new platform for enterprise, tech evolves quickly. What’s the next step for Hoyos down the line?
Hoyos: We are a biometric-based infrastructure company. We are building infrastructure for global authentication unlike anything ever seen before, around standards that we have created and have been adopted by the IEEE.