Interviews

Interview: Baudouin Genouville, Managing Director, Suprema

a&s Adria: Mr Genouville, could you present yourself to our readers: what is your role at Suprema, which departments and markets are you in charge with, your educational and professional background, etc.?

Genouville: As the Managing Director of Suprema Europe, my mission is to increase Suprema footprint and market share in Europe and Africa. For more than 15 years our business partners in the regions have been in direct interaction with Suprema Inc Korea and now we offer localized service for Sales, Consulting, Technical Support and logistics directly for Central Europe. Our office and warehouse are in France, Paris area and our Sales&Technical teams speak English/German/French/Spanish/Russian/Romanian.
This new organization is in place since early 2020 and it has proven success: our partners get delivered products quicker, do not need large stock, have technical answers replied within the day and do not lose time on fixing past project issues: they can focus on iterating new project, one after the other without the burden.

a&s Adria: This year Suprema celebrates 20th year in access control and time and attendance business. What were the most important milestones on a way to success, are you pleased with the position of Suprema, how many people do you employ, revenue, to how many contries does your sales network extend to, etc.?

Genouville: Suprema Inc employs 350 workers worldwide, we have reached 84,3M USD turnover in 2019, which represents 16% increase from previous year. When I remember that we were 120 employees in 2013, with near 20M USD turnover (year I have joined the company), then I can only measure positively our success.
The reason for success of Suprema in our region is the enjoyable customer journey, with our business partners repeating successful projects and implementation for both Mid-end and High-end Access Control and Time Attendance. Suprema grows together with its partners: they implement projects, get financial profit and knowledge out of it. And next year with another or the same end-user, our partner takes bigger projects (or site increase) and pushing for Suprema products to be used (because reliable and trusted). Suprema has 35 Business Partners in all countries of Europe and our BP are distributors, system integrators and sometimes installers.

a&s Adria: Aproximately, how many people are using your products and how many Suprema’s systems are in operation worldwide?

Genouville: Suprema’s fingerprint authentication algorithm is used by several large smartphone manufacturers, including Samsung Smartphones. It makes hundreds millions users for our solutions worldwide. For access control in Europe, we install each year in Europe 30,000+ doors, half of it being RFID and half of it being biometrics (Fingerprint and Face). So we estimate to have 150,000+ active doors, with 30 million monthly unique users. That makes us a leading Access Control provider in Europe.

a&s Adria: What are the most important Suprema core technologies? Could you present your product portfolio in brief?

Genouville: As I mentioned before, RFID represent 50% of our yearly sold units. We propose the legacy Centralized access control with [CoreStation Door Controller + Readers], and we are also the historical leader for the intelligent readers [Reader/Controller] called XPass. That edge product was first released in 2008 (XPass V1) and in 2019 we have launched Xpass2, that includes dual RF as well as BLE/NF for mobile credentials.
On the Biometric side, we offer most common authentication methods, with Fingerprint (85% of the market) and Face (7% of the market). So we are not focusing on Biometric niche market such as fingervein, handvein, iris and other handshape which all together represent less than 5~10% of the market.
We have seen in 2020 a huge growth for Face Authentication, due to COVID and the need for Contactless + Skin temperature measurement + Covid Mask presence detection. This has been happening without negative effect on our Fingerprint reader sales, since user understand using Fingerprint is not at risk when standard hygienic procedures are followed.

a&s Adria: Suprema has been expanding contactless solutions to better meet the market needs during the coronavirus pandemic. The highlight product this year has been your new multimodal terminal FaceStation F2. Why is it so innovative, and what is the advantage of combining two technologies: visual and IR face recognition?

Genouville: Since we have years of experience with new products launch, we can already tell that FaceStation F2 is and will be a successful product at Suprema. I see that the product level demand (sales order, technical, consulting) is similar to our flagship product “BioEntry W2” when it was launched in 2017. The FaceStation F2 was launched in October but due to high demand and multiple large projects won, we already have some tension on the manufacturing lines. Our factory is running fast but the demand is above forecast.
So why that success? FaceStation2 has high specs and combines all requirements from users: Convenience+Functionality-Performance-Security. It is using both Infra-Red and Visual sensors to authenticate the users. As a comparison, you would be able to tell if a meal is good if you look at it, but without being sure. But if you can both see and taste it, you know for sure if it is at your convenience. That is FaceStation F2, providing secure authentication from 50cm to 1.3meters distance, for any human kind and high, with/without glasses, makeup, beard, hat or covid mask (just to mention these).
By choosing Suprema FaceStation F2, customers know that they get a product that is reliable, will work for all employees, with good quality and performance. And that Suprema will support them in the next 5~10 years, as we have been doing so far. Not many companies can race Suprema when it comes to that proposal!
So that is why users chose Suprema FaceStation F2 even against other products that cost 30% its price, because they know they will have issues in 1, 2, 3 years with the cheaper product (and that makes the cheaper product more expensive!).

a&s Adria: What are the advantages of FaceStation F2 being a multimodal terminal?

Genouville: Advantages are: the reading distance, the security level (including fake faces), the capability to authenticate users in multiple face variation and outside environment (light/dark), the possibility to enroll user from pictures or to encode user’s face template on a smart card (Mifare, DesFire, EV1/EV2).
For example the FAR (false acceptance rate) of FaceStation F2 is 1 to 10 billion and that is the new standard that we have put in place for the industry.

a&s Adria: BioStar 2 is a security platform that provides comprehensive functionality for access control, time & attendance management, visitor management, and video log maintenance. Tell us more about it?

Genouville: BioStar2 is the software that allows one to use all the existing Suprema devices for access control and time attendance in a single platform. It is web-based, very easy to use interface and has an affordable price point (license level per door for access control and per number of users for time attendance).
BioStar2 is available in multiple languages and has a GDPR compliant design (protection of Data Subject information, right to be forgotten, Audit trail to see who is doing what in the software).
BioStar2 uses SQL, CSV extract or PDF reporting. It can be installed on premise or remote site, even in the cloud. Also BioStar2 natively embeds Server API (RESTful/Json) that allows IT services to use their own interface of APIs to interact with the solution (automation means less work for all).

a&s Adria: Suprema has developed professional industry solutions for different industries, properties and scale. Can you present or at least enlist some of the most important case studies?

Genouville: When it comes to Biometrics, our customers are the ones who need secure access to their data/financials/facilities. These customers are DataCenters, Banks, Military, Airport, Law Firms, Casinos, R&D centers. As an example, Suprema is the Biometric solution chosen for 8/10 of the biggest DataCenters and IT solution providers in the world. This is true for some years in USA and now becoming a fact in Europe as well for the last 2 years.
On the RFID side, our customers’ expectations are different. They are choosing Suprema for the ease of use of our system, the scalability, the security and the functionalities proposed (for example MS Active Directory or 3rd party Video System integration). 10 years ago, Security and IT department of a company used to work separately, but we see that in today modern companies, they are under the same director. Because with ransomware, CyberCriminality and hacking, the Physical Access and Ethernet are now part of the same world. With proposing Edge devices (all TCP/IP), PoE capability, TLS 1.2 encapsulation, SSL security, Suprema exactly fits and talk the language of these new IT & Security directors. We simplify their work.

a&s Adria: What will be the most important trends in access control and time and attendance markets and what can we expect from Suprema in the next year or two?

Genouville: When it comes to access control, the industry requires reliability. So business/products cannot change very quickly since users are not willing to take the risk to move to something 100% new. Variations only are accepted! So the industry is moving smoothly to more biometrics (face) or Mobile Cards but still the RFID card remains (and I believe it will still remain predominant for the next 5 years).

a&s Adria: Your opinion on Adriatic region access control market and your company’s position in it? Do you have any special plans in this area, is there enough interest for your products, are you looking for a regional partner, how do you plan to expand market share?

Genouville: We have seen in 2020 a lot of growth of Facial Recognition sales of our products in the Adriatic region. Not only new FaceStation F2, but our FaceLite (mid-end, launched in 2019 with ~800 EUR MSRP) and FaceStation2 (high-end, launched in 2017 with ~1200 EUR MSRP) have been successful. This is most of the time reserved to customers requiring high security. But when you think that you do not need card anymore (card = cost and time to manage), this also makes it affordable.
The specificity with Adriatic countries for Suprema is that our RFID product constitutes 70% of our sales in the region (vs 50% in the EU and less than 30% worldwide). Because our Access Control and Time Attendance solutions fits the market requirement and it is well priced thanks to the use of Xpass2 RFID reader.
This is our 3rd year participating to Adria Summit (or related) and I believe the good understanding of our solutions by the end-users is all thanks to our Business Partner in the region. We are glad that the Suprema offering is very well understood by our Adriatic RFID Customers: they can get the security, convenience of a modern solution, with being in the range of their forecasted budget.
For this work that pays well, I would like to personally thank our Partners in the Adriatic for their good job!

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