UrBC, Moscow, February 20, 2018. Rostelecom is launching its Unified Biometric Voice & Image Recognition System on a commercial scale on July 1, 2018, Prime refers to the company Vice President for Development Alexander Ayvasov as stating.

The system was designed by order of Russia’s Communications Ministry and the Central Bank of Russia. The initial version of the system was presented to the agencies on February 19.

‘Rostelecom started working on a united biometric identification system as recently as six months ago. The first working version of the system features the very technologies that will be used for biometric data collection and user authentication in July 2018, when the system gets launched on a commercial scale,’ Ayvasov says.

Some twenty-plus Russian banks are now testing the system. The full list of the system users is to be completed by the Bank of Russia.

According to Ayvasov, the biometric system can be used across a range of markets in the future, for example, in the finance sector, in healthcare, education, retail, e-commerce, and the civil service sector.