Jamie McMillen, Managing Director – UK & Ireland at Suprema, reveals more about the company’s core values and its vision of becoming the heartbeat of customer operations.

Tell me more about your role and your background? 

I am the Managing Director of Suprema Systems UK Ltd. 

Having left Norbain SD back in 2015 to help establish Suprema’s physical presence in the UK market through their partner BioConnect, I spent 18 months in this role before Suprema Inc. in Korea decided to take full ownership of the UK business. 

Our CEO, Hanchul Kim, and I began the process of establishing the brand in the region and investing in resources to support the customer base.

Suprema Systems UK was the first ‘Global Branch’ for the business.

We now have in excess of 60 global employees and eight branches across the world, from the US and LATAM to the Middle East and Japan. 

Can you provide a bit of detail about the products and services offered by Suprema? 

Suprema is a global leader in biometrics and access control, most well-known for our premium quality hardware, specifically fingerprint and face authentication devices.

More recently, we have been seeing success and demand for the BioStar2 software platform and our many embedded integrations into third-party systems. 

BioStar2 is one of your most successful products. What are the platform’s benefits? 

BioStar2 is a hybrid access control platform that combines server-based architecture with a web client. 

We are finding that more customers want ‘enterprise’ scale in terms of the number of readers and sites but are keen to have simple administrative software, and BioStar2 plays in this space really well. 

What makes you stand out from other companies in your field? 

Suprema is a proven leader in the market and is well-renowned for delivering high-quality hardware. Huge consideration is taken when bringing products to market to ensure they are the very best in performance, aesthetics, and that they fit a market need.

We pride ourselves on not over-complicating the portfolio. 

What is the long-term vision for Suprema? 

Ultimately, we want to be seen as much more than a global leader in biometrics. 

Our roadmap is focused on the convergence of technologies and providing a software platform that can be the heartbeat of a site’s security requirements. 

We aim to deliver not just enterprise-level hardware but also supporting software that can handle the demands of all sites. 

How do you see the biometrics and access control market evolving in the future? 

It is very clear that the marketplace is changing.

Collaboration and integration are very much the order of the day.

The growth of face authentication and particularly ‘mobile credentials’ and smart buildings is driving the need for us all to work more openly for the benefit of the end user. 

It’s an exciting time, and one that Suprema is keen to embrace. 

This article was originally published in the June Edition of Security Journal United Kingdom. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.