ID R&D Adds Biometrics Expert Steve Cook and Voice Industry Veteran Kim Martin to Executive Team

Biometrics Firm Invests in Leadership with New Hires, Tapping Their Combined Experience in the Digital Identity and Marketing Industries

ID R&D, the award-winning biometrics technology provider offering AI-based voice and behavioral biometrics and voice and face anti-spoofing technologies, announced the addition of Steve Cook and Kim Martin to its executive team. Cook, a biometrics industry expert, will join as Global Head of Business Development and will oversee partner development and integration implementation. Martin, VP of Marketing, will be responsible for building a global brand to grow and accelerate sales. ID R&D is also bringing on Scott Rosenthal as Director of Sales, Financial Services to lead global sales efforts among banks and financial institutions.

Grand View Research predicts the global biometrics technology market will likely reach over $59 billion by 2025. This growth is driven by massive enterprise investment in biometric authentication, and firms are searching for solutions that can reliably deliver a secure, yet effortless user experience. With an experienced leadership team, deep engineering talent, product strength, and fast-growing sales, ID R&D is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this market opportunity.

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Cook brings over eight years of biometric industry experience to ID R&D, with particular specialist knowledge in the areas of financial services and biometric modalities. Most recently, Cook has driven business development and strategic initiatives for a number of established biometric vendors. He is a member of the RegTech and Security Advisory Board for FinTechConnect for biometrics technology and is widely recognized as a global expert on digital identity and biometric authentication. Cook has also led biometric and fintech consultancy initiatives for a number of banks and ecommerce enterprises as the founder of Biometrics for eCommerce.

Martin has spent the past two decades defining new categories and building successful marketing programs for emerging voice technology providers and voice initiatives in the enterprise. Most recently, she advised global clients at Refinery Lab, which she joined after serving as VP of Corporate Marketing as Aspect Software. Martin has led marketing teams at Voxeo, VidSoft, VoX Communications, and Vocalocity (now Vonage) and has consulted many businesses on best practices to align organizational and business goals with marketing strategies.

Rosenthal comes from customer risk intelligence firm Arachnys, where he led global sales and customer success efforts. With rare talent for, and expertise in, financial services industry sales, Rosenthal has also directed sales and business development efforts for Matrix IFS, Lexis-Nexis, Fortent, and My Leverage.

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These leadership hires add to a rapidly expanding ID R&D, and will support the company’s record growth. In the first two quarters of 2019, ID R&D has doubled both its sales and its staff. The company grew its technology portfolio in March with the launch of IDAudio, an acoustic event detection solution, and in August, with the release of IDLive Face, the world’s first fully passive liveness detection. The company has also released updates to its voice biometric solution IDVoice, its multimodal face and behavioral biometric authentication solution, IDSquared, and its biometric authentication product for chatbots and virtual assistants, SafeChat. ID R&D closed its Series A funding in May.

“We are investing to make ID R&D the leading biometric authentication and anti-spoofing technology provider for any application, on any device. Steve, Kim, and Scott bring the deep experience and talent necessary for us to grow and lead the multibillion-dollar biometric authentication market.” Alexey Khitrov, CEO, ID R&D

“Today’s enterprises are increasingly deploying biometric authentication and looking to eliminate the clunky user experience and security vulnerabilities of password- and 2FA-based systems. Yet it’s only recently, with AI-powered technology, that biometrics have come close to balancing security and UX in a manner that doesn’t sacrifice one for the other. Joining ID R&D is an easy choice for me as the company is ushering in an era of effortless authentication that meets equally high security standards. I look forward to leveraging my extensive background and network to build partnerships that accelerate adoption and deployment of ID R&D technology across the globe.” Steve Cook, Global Head of Business Development, ID R&D

“The last decade has produced enormous disruption in the voice and biometrics markets and there is a great opportunity for the right company to finally bring zero-effort, continuous authentication to all channels, in all industries. With a seasoned executive team, a strong product and technology portfolio, and massive investment in AI research and development, ID R&D has everything in place to lead the market. I’m excited to establish ID R&D as the best authentication choice for the applications of today, and tomorrow.” Kim Martin, VP Marketing, ID R&D

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