Creating the Electronic Fingerprinting Service Industry

The Full Story

I got involved with Integrated Biometric Technology right at the beginning. The founders had spotted a market in financial services — large banks needed to fingerprint new employees for background checks. The old ink-on-paper method was slow and messy, and electronic capture scanners were clearly a better answer. This device ecosystem was just emerging. The scanners coming to market were early hardware with crude software that couldn't support what IBT wanted to sell. So they came to us at Lockheed Martin in Orlando, where the biometrics work on the FBI AFIS program had built real expertise in fingerprint imaging, digital routing, and federal systems.

I became their point of contact and champion inside the company. I put together a small team of software developers and we built the two products IBT needed: the Electronic Fingerprint Capture Station, a Windows PC paired with a live-scan fingerprint device, and the Fingerprint Interface Server, which gathered and routed transactions to the appropriate channels. IBT funded the development and owned the software, with LM retaining license rights. For the next several years I managed that relationship — writing statements of work when new requirements came in, building out features as the customer base grew, traveling to support sales calls and deployments, and making sure the technology kept pace with a business that was moving faster than anything else in my portfolio. Inside LM, which normally moved slowly and deliberately, we were helping a small startup operate at startup speed.

At first the business model was exactly what IBT had imagined: sell workstations and servers to customers who wanted to run their own fingerprinting operations. It was a real business. It just wasn't the large one.

A larger idea came out of discussions with the Florida Department of Education, who needed to background-check teachers and school workers but had no interest in becoming a technology operator. They wanted the problem solved, not a system to manage. That opened the door to a recurring revenue model. IBT would supply and maintain the equipment, train local staff, and route the fingerprints through its server infrastructure directly to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — and instead of selling hardware, the company would be paid per transaction. We called it per click. The customer avoided buying and managing technology, the state could predict its costs, and IBT could fold equipment, training, support, and maintenance into a single transaction price. Fees would be passed through to the applicant. The model was cleaner, easier to explain, and far more natural for government buyers than a capital purchase. Once it proved itself in Florida, it changed the direction of the company.

The federal breakthrough came through TSA. After 9/11, one of the new agency's early priorities was background-checking hazardous materials drivers — truck drivers whose licenses authorized them to haul dangerous cargo. The need was urgent enough, and TSA was young enough, that they skipped the normal lengthy procurement and invited interested companies to come in for one-shot presentations. IBT asked me to join that meeting. The team was Charlie Carroll, IBT's CEO, Dick Spencer from sales, and me. We walked into TSA and explained the Florida model and transaction fees, showed how TSA could avoid buying equipment or hiring staff, and described how the driver's fee would cover the vendor, the program, and the various background checks.

At one point TSA asked directly whether Lockheed Martin stood behind IBT. The question mattered — IBT was a small company, and TSA needed to know it could deliver at national scale. I told them yes: Lockheed Martin stood behind IBT. That wasn't a sales line. My team had built the technology, I understood how to extend it, and I knew what it would take to make the program real. We won the HazPrint contract. That award transformed the company, proving that fingerprinting as a service could operate at national scale and giving IBT a federal program that anchored everything that followed.

The HazPrint win deepened IBT's ambitions — and eventually led to the decision that changed my own career. L-1 Identity Solutions, a company assembling the fragmented biometrics industry under one roof, acquired IBT as one of its first moves. The acquisition gave Charlie Carroll the capital and the mandate to reduce IBT's dependence on Lockheed Martin. We had been essential, but our labor rates were a constant point of friction, and if IBT was going to grow inside L-1 it needed to own its technical capability. Charlie recruited me. I had been at LM for twenty-one years, had a pension, and had a comfortable path available. But the IBT work had always been the most alive part of my career there — fast, customer-close, and centered on building a real business rather than just executing programs. I left and joined IBT as Vice President of Engineering with the mandate to build the internal technical organization.

Our scope expanded almost immediately. L-1 then acquired Identix, which had been IBT's primary competitor, bringing both industry-leading capture devices and its own collection of state and commercial fingerprint service contracts. With both companies under one roof, a critical internal question arose: would the service business consolidate under IBT, or would IBT be absorbed into the larger operation? Charlie fought for the right answer — devices with one entity, services with IBT — and won. That decision immediately expanded the technical mission. We had to integrate state networks, code, people, contracts, and processes from the acquired company into ours. IBT's growth was no longer just organic. We were absorbing a major competitor and shaping what the combined business would become.

My roles evolved as the company grew. I moved through Vice President of Engineering, then EVP of Operations, then EVP of Business Development as Charlie deliberately rotated his executive team to develop their breadth and refresh the organization. Each rotation gave me a different vantage point on the same business. In operations I reorganized the TWIC program's nationwide field structure and helped turn the program around. In business development I led the federal captures, including the HazPrint recompete — which TSA rated outstanding — and later other large federal opportunities including TWIC, USCIS, and the Universal Enrollment Service.

By the end of that chapter, IBT held something like eighty to ninety percent of the addressable fingerprinting services market in the United States. There were dozens of state contracts and multiple national programs. More than a thousand enrollment locations across the country were processing millions of applicants a year through systems that traced their lineage directly to the early work my team had done in Orlando. The quarterly business reviews with L-1's chairman in Stamford were a different kind of education — detailed reviews of numbers, pipeline, captures, and organizational structure, with real accountability for how every piece contributed to a larger value creation story. I had come a long way from writing statements of work for a startup with an idea.

The lesson from IBT was simple: the product was not the scanner. The product was the completed transaction. Customers did not want to own fingerprinting technology; they wanted a reliable path from applicant to approved background check. Once the business was built around that outcome, the economics changed. Hardware sales became recurring transaction revenue. Local installations became a national network. A small startup became the company whose model defined the market.