Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Kelvin Koh, CEO at Intercorp Solutions:
Q: Can you tell us something more about yourself and your company?
A: Hi, my name is Kelvin Koh and I’m the CEO of Intercorp Solutions, a Singapore-based biometrics tech company, which specializes in providing manpower management, time attendance, payroll, productivity and security solutions for businesses. Our cloud-based Biometric Authentication System (BAS) suite of solutions are currently being used by many government agencies, multinational companies and small businesses.
Q: What is Intercorp’s BAS? And what are the advantages of using BAS?
A: Intercorp’s BAS is a cloud-based application which leverages on cutting-edge biometrics technologies to help companies and organizations reduce traditional issues such as buddy-punching (staff time-clocking in and out for one another), reduce overtime expenditure, authenticate authorized personnel to a high fidelity for maximum security, automate working hour calculations for payroll, and produce instant reports for management information. Being a cloud application, it is accessible anytime, anywhere and have unlimited scalability to cater to all companies of various sizes.
Intercorp’s BAS system is currently built upon advanced contact-less facial recognition technologies, which can achieve up to 99.99% accuracy in facial identifications, with liveness detection, and workplaces are easily added onto the platform through simple plug-and-play configurations. Dashboards consolidate overview metrics and reports from various workplaces into a single, simplified view. Access rights of each employee to workplaces are easily manageable from the cloud system as well.
There are many advantages in using Intercorp’s BAS, namely:
- Reduce employees’ overtime costs
- Improve workplace security
- Automate time attendance calculations for payroll
- Manage manpower of various workplaces through a single, standardize system
- Affordable, highly accessible proven secured cloud system
Q: Can you give us insights into your solutions?
A: Intercorp BAS is currently hosted in a secured and reliable cloud infrastructure in Singapore, and customers access a common gateway to view their individual company’s dashboards. Each company can support an unlimited number of workplaces or projects, and they can easily add or import employees profiles for access rights, and movements or productivity tracking. Facial recognition can be captured by several options, either by standalone wall-mounted devices, mobile apps or by our new video cameras. These can be linked to door access, for heightened access security, and they are designed in easy plug-and-play integration to the BAS cloud server.
Data captured by these devices are synchronized in real-time back to BAS cloud server, where it would be instantly processed and stored. Dashboards will present a high-level overview of real-time statistics and users will be able to generate reports for details. Movement reports, attendance patterns, productivity measurements and more can be derived from BAS’ vast pool of collected data.
Users have additional option of utilizing BAS mobile applications to complement their requirements, with additional features, such as mobile dashboards, safety rollcall functions and self service check-in/outs for mobile workforce.
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Q: How will biometric technology affect our lives? What’s going to change in the future?
A: At a personal level, with the introduction of mobile phones’ facial recognition (such as Apple’s FaceID) for security, the public is increasingly accepting biometrics as a de facto, fast, secured and reliable method. General sentiments and acceptance has clearly risen significantly during recent years.
What we have seen so far from market trends and global acknowledgement is that biometrics has become increasingly entrenched into our daily lives, as AI (artificial intelligence) becomes more and more pervasive and encouraged by global governments. Used in the correct manner, biometrics can improve public and workplace security, user experiences and better data connections to individuals. We see a trend of biometrics moving into the commercial sectors, such as retail, service, manufacturing and more, as customer and employees identification through biometrics becomes an acceptable norm.
In the near future, it will be unavoidable that organizations and companies will clearly leverage on the advantages of biometrics and integrate such technologies seamlessly into their customer service, people management and tracking processes, as it provides access to big data, behavior analysis, and high fidelity individual identification. The key concern is then how protection of sensitive personal information is regarded, and that users are given the choice to opt out if they want to.
Q: How much did you contribute to Singapore’s biometrics market?
A: Intercorp is Singapore’s very first biometrics solutions provider, providing fingerprint recognition technologies in the early 2000s. During the subsequent SARS, hand-mouth-and-foot diseases outbreaks, many hygiene concerns were raised which spurred us to start looking and developing hygienic, contact-less alternatives that are still affordable and reliable. In 2009, Intercorp official introduced our first contact-less facial recognition technology to Singapore’s market.
As our company and reputation grew, Intercorp started getting enquiries from many different sectors, such as retail, service, manufacturing, construction and more. Today we are serving over 200,000 users on our systems, with key projects such managing over 200 outlets of NTUC FairPrice supermarkets, all of Singapore’s postal offices under Singpost and multiple line-wide MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) stations by LTA (Singapore Land Transport Authority). About 60 to 70% of all Singapore’s construction projects utilizes our systems for their safety, security and productivity purposes as well.
Besides Singapore, Intercorp have expanded overseas, with multiple distributing partners in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and China. We are looking at the India market optimistically as well, as we’d opened our first overseas branch there in 2018.
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Q: Can you give us any hints as to what else we might expect to see from Intercorp Solutions this year?
A: In 2020, we are preparing to launch a couple of interesting technologies that we have been working on for some years. Firstly, we will be making our facial recognition engine available to other software development companies, who are looking to implement accurate facial recognition for their applications. Our “Visage Facial Recognition Engine” is fully developed in Singapore and will be Singapore’s very first commercially available biometrics engine.
We will also be unveiling our omni-present, non-intrusive facial recognition video cameras, which not only serve as traditional security cameras, but are able to track and recognize individuals as well. Its applications can be extended to non-intrusive employees’ time attendance for payroll, seamless door access, customer identification for premium services and more.
On the whole, we will continue to enhance and improve our BAS suite of solutions, with our vision to become a quality global biometrics provider in the security, time attendance, payroll, productivity and safety space.
