Vanguard Magazine

16 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022 www.vanguardcanada.com TECHNOLOGY consequences on both sides. The employer might have had to operate short-staffed un- til the background check cleared. And the new hire would have had to wait that much longer to start working, which would have been a bigger problem had they very much needed to start earning money. The Commissionaires approach to fin- gerprinting solved all those problems at once, and the RCMP wasted no time get- ting behind the company. Today, Commissionaires has over a hun- dred digital fingerprinting systems de- ployed across 50 offices in most major cit- ies in every province and territory. Commissionaires wins by staying ahead Recognizing that consumers expect the option to have anything come to them, Mr. Guindon created a mobile fingerprint- ing service he now regularly sends to uni- versity campuses and large companies. "Instead of sending employees or stu- dents one by one, we can go to their loca- tion, take a bunch of prints in any given day of the week or any weekend, and have them processed quickly so everyone can get on with it." Another interesting path Mr. Guindon took was to set up an offshore version of his service for Canadian citizens working or living outside Canada who need a fin- gerprint taken. A third was an international program where someone has ink and roll prints taken by a Canadian embassy/consulate or local police agency, then couriers the prints to Commissionaires who transfer it into a digital format. The latest being developed by Mr. Guin- don and his team is a new technology that would get the fingerprinting process from 15 minutes down to five. And while he would never say he saw the COVID-19 pandemic coming, being able to offer digital fingerprinting was certainly helpful. "We obviously had to amend our process- es a little bit to protect clients and opera- tors," said Mr. Guindon. "But we were able to process prints all throughout the pan- demic time. I'm not sure how we would've done it with the old ink and roll." Digital fingerprinting for a digital world Despite the super-cool iris and facial recog- nition devices we see in spy movies, finger- printing is the default biometric method of access control because it's much more affordable. It's also predictable, non-intru- sive, safe, and easy to catalog. For this reason, Mr. Guindon and his team at Commissionaires have branched out to provide more fingerprint-related services like security system installation, IT integration, cyber security, and training programs for everything they offer. And with 83.4 percent of the world's population owning a smartphone and roughly 60 percent of those phones al- ready using fingerprint biometrics, getting buy-in from employees to move away from security card access control and towards fingerprint technology is easier than ever. Today, the fingerprint access control mar- ket is estimated to be worth $4.4 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2014. The future of digital fingerprinting Fingerprint technology is set to start re- placing or living next to traditional physi- cal methods of verification like PIN num- bers at ATMs or at the point-of-sale in retail environments. Another big change coming is the stor- ing of biometric fingerprint data on a bank card or credit card itself instead of in a centralized database. The big benefit of this approach is protection of financial in- stitution's customer data in the event of a cyber-attack. But maybe the biggest future change coming to fingerprinting has to do with the rise of the sharing economy — and specifically home sharing. People who rent out their homes through platforms like AirBnB or VRBO will be able to ditch the practice of con- stantly watching their door cam and will instead be able to install digital fingerprint reading to grant and revoke access to rent- ers. And all of it will be automated so the homeowner can rest easy wherever they are with the knowledge that everything's taken care of back home. This will no doubt spur more people into considering adding their homes, sheds, businesses, rehearsal spaces, sports fields, and restaurants/bars to a sharing platform, further growing this exciting new area of the economy. Commissionaires will be wherever fingerprinting security goes next "For as long as we've been providing fin- gerprints and background screening, which goes back to about 17 years, we've brought other security services online as well," says Mr. Guindon. "Today, our clients include municipalities, law enforcement depart- ments and private sector companies look- ing to either beef up their security or con- duct workplace investigations into security breaches." But the real opportunity he sees is in proactivity. "Threat risk assessment is a big deal," he says. "We'll tell a client 'Okay, well, you have this facility, how best can we protect it? What kind of security cameras and sys- tem should you put in place? How many people have to manage those systems? And what kind of biometric security do you need? Then we can do the installation. We can do the servicing and maintenance, and really work with our client to create a com- plete solution — not just the fingerprint- ing part. But the fingerprint technology ties everything together." You can listen to the entire interview with Paul Guindon, CEO of Commissionaires, here And you can learn more about Commissionaires on their website https://commissionaires.ca/en/about-us/

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