Information and analysis company IHS Markit has made its predictions for electronic access control for the year 2017. According to its report, the access control market will increase this year by 6.8%, exceeding $4.2 billion.

The company says deeper integrations with video surveillance, business processes and IOT will ensure that access control continues to play a larger role in enterprise. IT, integration and mobility (remote connectivity) specialists are expected to see more growth as logical/physical security integrations together with remote services such as access-control-as-a-service are expected to be some of the top trends. Mobile credentials and biometrics will be two of the top hardware trends to watch.

Mobile credential downloads are expected to triple from last year’s estimated 4.5 million downloads to 13.5 million in 2017.

IHS Markit analyst, Jimmy Dearing, says market sentiment indicates that mobile credentials in access control is not only a strong value proposition by itself, but they also have the ability to unlock a more integrated and better value system for the end user. They do this while also allowing providers new avenues of services that can support revenues streams going forward.

Mobile credentials are not competing against the traditional physical card at this time and therefore have a potential market equal to that of smart cards, he adds. A 9% growth in electronic locks is expected in emerging countries globally. Eastern Europe and Africa will lead all other regions, with an estimated growth of up to 17% for electronic locks.

New biometric technologies will be among the highlights as facial recognition is predicted to make further strides towards establishing itself as the second most popular type of biometric reader. Dearing says there is much competition between facial and iris recognition which battle for the second-most used type of biometric security, while fingerprint remains the standard.

Iris recognition is said to be more accuracy and superiority, however Dearing forecasts an increasing interest in facial recognition as it is easier to install and does not have (unfounded) concerns for health. The facial recognition market is expected to make rapid growth over the next five years, although it will not overtake iris recognition in revenue or shipments, it will have momentum.

Although China’s impact on access control is said to have been far less profound compared to video surveillance, Chinese manufacturers are predicted to gain share. “China will begin to have more influence on trends across Asian-pacific as well as the global access control market beginning in 2017.”

China, which seems to have an unprecedented number of factory erections, seemingly every month, according to Dearing, will have the competitive pricing advantage as each new factory is keen to establish itself in terms of market share.

There is a double digit growth expectation for IP-enabled access controllers which are set to grow at twice the rate compared to other panel variants. This reflects greater use of Web-based and online products. With access control systems moving from PC-based to mobile-based control elements, associated infrastructure can also be expected to change.