Philadelphia-based American company CiRight Companies last week introduced Jamaica’s business class to the CyberOne Card, touting the device as the first biometric card that can be paired with mobile phones to fulfil multiple functions.

Chairman and CEO of CiRight Joe Callahan on Friday demonstrated the use of the card to guests gathered for a joint seminar with the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce at the Spanish Court Hotel in New Kingston. He said that his company has spent 1.5 million man hours building the technology, combining 25 years of experience from a team of 100 individuals to make daily processes “safer, simpler and more secure”.

Callahan also shared that the biometric card was developed with the company’s four pillars in mind: the people inside the organisation; the services and products for which we represent to provide to our community; the individuals we serve, whether they be customers or constituents, neighbour or friends; and the transactions people conduct.

“Those four pillars digitally connect with everything else in our lives from an electronic digital exhaust standpoint that provides a fingerprint of us interacting with those organisations [and individuals],” he pointed out.

“Today we run multiple disparate systems and we try and organise all these information and we wake up and are distracted immediately by the inundation of those information. What we provide is the simplicity to organise that information so that your day is organised and, more importantly, that your days ahead are organised so that you can sleep and rest and wake up and you’re not distracted with thousands of thoughts,” Callahan further explained.

With this in mind, the CyberOne Card can manage up to 200 apps linked to the user’s cellphone while providing multiple usage as a music card, loyalty card, gift card, drivers’ licence and/or passport, credit/debit card, and business card, and keyless entry into buildings. Using FIDO (fast identity online) and personal identification verification (PIV) technologies, the card allows users the ability to modify usage using a fingerprint.

When asked if the card can decipher between a human being and a bot, Callahan noted that the technology is able to do so using biometric signature stored in a cloud.

“It enables us to take control of the destiny but, more importantly, to be able to assist others that are doing a needs assessment of their organisation so that anything can be customised to that entity’s requirements — that’s user experience, the front end. We know that the front end of anything is how you’re perceived in technology: Is it simple? Is it easy to use? Is it intuitive?” Callahan outlined.

Moreover, the card can be customised “very quickly, very efficiently to feel and appear in a manner that is representative of the people consuming the technology”, he expounded.

The CiRight Companies founder underscored the need for technologies of this type given the rise of cybersecurity threats, and boasted that CyberOne card’s “security…is second to none”. The company also offers a full family of products that can be integrated while providing users with cybersecurity at all levels.

“With cybersecurity and the threats we have every day, we’re very proud of the fact that this is the only card certified by Microsoft globally for password-less authentication…with your finger on the card identifying you uniquely [and] globally protecting you.”

CiRigth Companies’ products include the CyberOne biometric card, CyberOne payments card, CyberOne biometric key and FIDO-accredited server.

According to Callahan, the CyberOne biometric card’s CPU power, storage capacity and memory exceeds the original Macintosh computer that Apple unveiled in 1983. As such, he contended that the technology will contribute to leapfrogging digital innovations over the next five years.

“It becomes the one card that we carry to do everything. It’s paired with our phones and we control how it operates from our phones, and we control what we load on it from our phones. So it’s an extension and a companion device to our phones,” he outlined.

This is the first time the company has gone international with one of its innovations, the CEO revealed.

“As a US-based company, we have never taken the initiative to go international until this year. And it was in our fourth decade of business that we then made the decision we’re going to go international and when we go international, we are going to find the appropriate individuals that we can partner with, that can share in the equity of the company and that we take a position in the back seat and we allow them to bring their relationships and their trust and people of need to change their world and we empower them …and that engine is our core, what we refer to as the monolithic core, it is also referred to as the killer app because it applies to everything we do digitally,” he said.