By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A Bahamian technology provider says it is investing in a “data recovery laboratory” that will employ biometrics, and face and voice recognition, to help prevent fraud in an increasingly digital world.

Peter Bridgewater, Open Systems Technologies' president, told Tribune Business that data protection is becoming increasingly pivotal to the conduct of business as cyber fraud continues to increase on a global level. And, with facial recognition and biometric technology, which uses fingerprints and other unique characteristics to verify identity, becoming increasingly accepted he hopes to use this to combat fraud.

"One of the newest things that we provide in terms of identity verification and anti-money laundering is be able to provide biometrics," he said. "We've moved into voice, biometrics and facial recognition, and there's a lot of fraud, so we have a solution whereby you can scan with a selfie and it records your face and checks against various legal documents you have, like your driver's licence, your passport, and ensures that that is you who’s actually using that documentation.

“We will be rolling out a number of other services, and identity verification and some other solutions very shortly, that will enable businesses and customers to be able to recover data no matter what type of device that they've lost or used.”

The push towards biometric verification and screening is moving the technology industry towards better storage facilities for personal data, “We're setting up a lab to be able to do that for any type of electronic device, being able to open up the hard drive, take the disk out, put it into a donor drive and be able to extract the data, and things like that, so you you don't have to worry about sending that outside of the country,” Mr Bridgewater said.

Having personally experienced how distressing data loss can be, Mr Bridgewater said this is part of the reason why he is investing in a “data recovery lab, and I think it will also be one of the first ones here in The Bahamas".

He added: “Basically all of the devices are brought to this lab, and we will have all of the tools to do what it is we need to do. We are working with a top lab where all of these things are produced, particularly the chips for the CCTV, to be able to extract the data no matter how much of it someone had destroyed.

“Cyber security is a very important issue, but what we are doing is a data recovery and biometrics lab, because facial recognition is going to become very important when you start using digital IDs. You need to be able to ensure that the facial recognition technology, when it moves to electronic voting and digital IDs, that you have the tools that can prove that someone is who they say they are.”