Hello everyone, this is Vince Graziani, Chief Executive Officer of IDEX. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for the second quarter 2022 quarterly presentation for IDEX. Thank you very much. Let's jump right in. First of all, it's important that we acknowledge the usual disclaimers that this presentation will contain some forward-looking statements, et cetera. Now, having acknowledged that, let's move on and talk about IDEX and the opportunity. For those new to the story, a few of these slides will be a little bit. I'll repeat them for those that know the story already. For those that are new, we're addressing a multi-billion opportunity, multi-billion dollar market opportunity. The market for payment cards is just huge, and we'll talk about the details on that.
IDEX has a solution for biometric payment cards. It has superior performance, we'll talk about the details there, a disruptive cost, and we're capturing the market at an inflection point. I think, for me personally, and many of us that know the company, we'd like to see that inflection point happen sooner, but we do have lots of evidence in the market that it is in fact happening. What is the real case for biometric cards in the industry? Many of you use your contactless payment cards today, or you may have a government ID or some ID for your office or other function, where you're using actual card form factor.
The idea behind the biometric payment card is it behaves just the same as your standard payment card, debit, credit cards that are contactless, except that you use a fingerprint sensor instead of the PIN. The idea behind this is you hold the card, hold it over a point of sale terminal, the card powers up, matches your fingerprint, and approves the transaction. With the IDEX total solution, all of that can happen, including the fingerprint match, in about half a second. Really the key there for the payment card is simple ease of use. For the user, it's exact same user experience as you get with a contactless card today, but infinitely more secure. Now, one of the other big concerns with people is identity protection when it comes to biometrics.
The beauty of the biometric card is none of your biometric data is stored in the internet or on the cloud. When you get the card at home, you enroll your fingerprint locally in the privacy of your own home, or you can enroll it on your smartphone. In any case, your fingerprint is captured on the card, converted to a digital image, and then stored in an encrypted format only on the Secure Element on the card. You don't need to worry about your biometric data somehow being breached in the next big data breach on the cloud somewhere. Obvious benefits for fraud mitigation. The biometric card uses your fingerprint to authenticate you, so dramatic reduction in fraud. For the banking industry, there are direct economic benefits.
The differentiation enabled for banks by having a biometric card will attract new customers. Many customers polled say that if they had the biometric card available, that would be the first card that they would use, so it's a top of wallet effect for the banks. Banks are able to actually charge more for these cards, and there are banks already out in the industry that are charging a monthly fee, and customers are happy to pay that to have all the benefits of the biometric card. Just in recent last few weeks, we've seen other applications come into the space for fingerprint authenticated biometric cards. Many of you may have seen the articles from France where the French healthcare system has a card today that they use for access to the French healthcare system.
It's called the Carte Vitale. The interesting thing is that France has now funded a pilot to start launching cards using biometrics for this, and it actually checks many of the boxes here. For a healthcare card that also can be used as a payment card, you want it to be simple and easy to use so that all people in the society, even folks that might have disabilities or memory issues, the fingerprint biometric card makes it simple. You don't have to remember a PIN. One of the big concerns in the French biometric card program was people were worried about storing their biometrics out in the cloud, just the example that I gave just a moment ago. The fingerprint biometric card actually eliminates that problem.
As I said, your fingerprint data is encrypted and stored only on the card. In the case of the French healthcare card, it's interesting. Fraud was a major problem here. In fact, one of the articles I read said there are 7 million more healthcare cards in France than there are people. People are out there printing up fraudulent cards and fraud is a big concern, costing the French government EUR billions per year. When you think about the use case for the biometric card, this is a very recent example that really checks all the boxes for fingerprint authenticated biometric cards. We, again, look at the size of the opportunity. The total market for smart cards globally is about 5 billion smart cards per year, and it's still growing.
These are all cards that have a Secure Element chip built into the cards. If you look at the market that IDEX is targeting today, we're targeting contactless cards. Today there's last year in 2021 there were more than 2 billion contactless cards issued, and that's still growing at a rate of 8% growth rate per year. The market is just a massive market for biometric cards. The penetration rate is rising very quickly for biometric cards. Personally, I would like that to go even faster, but the growth rate is faster than it was for the adoption of contactless cards when they first came to market seven or eight years ago.
We're forecasting a penetration rate of around 18% in the market by 2025, several years from now, which would give us a total market of about 500 million cards. It's a very large market. It's a multi-billion dollar market just for payment cards alone. As I talked about with this healthcare card, there are many other emerging applications as well in the marketplace. 2022 has had its challenges. I have presented at these quarterly presentations in the past and talked about all the bank launches that we anticipated this year with our customers. Many of those have been delayed. I want to make a clear point that these launches have been delayed, but to the best of our knowledge, none of them have been canceled.
We've not heard of a single bank that had a plan for a biometric card that has totally scrapped those plans. Everything has just been delayed in the marketplace. The biggest issue that banks are relating to us is the chip shortage for Secure Element chips. Secure Element chips are typically the most the current nodes that are being used are a 40 nanometer CMOS node. We all know there's a shortage of chips in the industry, particularly for these Secure Element chips. Many banks are on allocation and only able to get about 50% of the standard contactless payment cards that they are issuing to customers today in the millions. Banks are very focused on getting their allocations and getting cards out there to renew large card bins.
With this current environment, many banks have just put on hold any initiatives to launch new cards with biometrics. Those launch plans are still in place, but as I said, many of them have been delayed. The war in Ukraine has not helped. Again, Europe is one of the areas where we anticipated bank launches to come early and more often. With the war in Ukraine, again, it's not a good market environment for people to think about launching new products in the banking world. Just overall getting the momentum and getting the ball rolling in the banking industry, in this, particularly in the payment card industry, it's a fast follower type of industry. Many people saw this when the metal payment card was introduced.
Some of the higher-end premium cards first came out with metal cards, and then many banks followed and launched. Many different banks had launched with metal cards, and there's a growing momentum there. We anticipate the same thing will happen with biometric cards, as once more and more of the larger banks launch, others will have to quickly follow. Again, the key message here is all the data that we have shows the market is delayed, but not canceled. What do we anticipate happening? We talk about segment launches during 2022, and here is an example of the specific types of customer segments that are really driving early adoption. We anticipate that the affluent segment will be among the first.
The high-end premium cards where these clients are already paying a premium to carry a metal card or a premium card with additional services, those same clients will want to have the very latest and most secure biometric cards. We're working with several partners to bring biometric metal cards to market for that segment. In the sort of tech-savvy mass market, the younger professionals who want differentiation, these younger professionals don't even go into a bank branch. Many of them work with the all-digital banks and the bank challengers like our joint customer with IDEMIA, Rocker. This is another segment that's driving adoption early, and you'll see more and more of these challenger banks also coming out with these biometric cards to be a challenge.
On the corporate side, companies that are focused on corporate expense control and corporate cards, et cetera, this is another area where people want to be able to ensure that the payment cards are being used by the employees who are exactly assigned to that card. Security is a big deal also in corporate transactions, large expenses on cards for corporate payments. This is another area we had launched with manager.one together with IDEMIA last quarter in Q1. Another segment that is growing is the special needs segment. I mentioned this earlier. Anywhere where people are memory impaired or maybe have other impairments that they're not easily remembering their passcodes or their PINs, this biometric card is another way to include them in the system.
As I talked also about the Carte Vitale, you can have a biometric payment card that is multi-use. That same card can also contain all of your access information to your medical insurance and your healthcare records, et cetera, all protected by your fingerprint biometrics. In terms of launch activity, we're seeing still there's growing activity all around the world. We still see the European banks as among the first to get out there. They were among the first with chip and PIN and among the first with contactless, and we're seeing banks prepare for launches there. We're getting much more traction in the Asia-Pacific region. We're seeing lots of activity in Japan.
We're now having activity in Vietnam and Malaysia, and most recently, we're starting to see activity with banks and issuers and payment schemes in India, with a very large population there as well. The number of potential cards with the customers that we're connected with, more than 120 million by 2025 potential total cards in just the Asia-Pacific region alone. Latin and South America is now becoming a much bigger market for this as well. It looks like the Latin and South America markets will also be among the early adopters for this. We're seeing growing momentum there. In fact, part of the IDEX commercial team is actually at a large banking conference in Brazil this week and meeting with customers there.
We expect launches to be coming out of Latin and South America in the near future. Then in the Middle East and Africa, there are more than 10 launches there in the pipeline. Fraud is a big issue in this region and that's what's driving demand, and there's also a big affluent segment in the Middle East as well. All of these segments are still out there and still growing, and we anticipate being able to announce specific customers and launches over the coming quarters. Beyond payment, one of the visions that we've talked about at IDEX Biometrics in all of these presentations in the past is the ability to use the biometric card in other applications besides payment.
The people that know me have heard me talk about the biometric card becoming a small electronic device, and this is really the beauty of the full platform, turnkey solution that we're doing together with Infineon, where you have the electronic device that includes the secure element processor chip for encryption. It has our biometric sensor, which includes a high-end processor, and now a card operating system. The card operating system is set up so that you can add applets to that card, very similar to the way you add apps to your smartphone. The initial applets that we're working on are the, obviously the EMV, Eurocard, Mastercard, Visa payment applet for standard payment card.
Beyond that, you can then add very simply an app that you would use this card for, digital currency or cryptocurrency storage for a cold storage as a crypto wallet. Or you could use the same card as a digital authenticator to unlock an app on your smartphone, and using the NFC in your smartphone together with your card, add security to your smartphone. I think there's a growing awareness from everybody that our smartphones are protected by biometrics, but your smartphone alone is not secure enough because it's always on, and it's always connected to the internet.
We're all susceptible to malware, and I think all of us at one point or other, and me almost every day, receives a text with a link, that's phishing in order to try to get me to install some sort of malware on my phone that would then perhaps, attack my digital crypto accounts or my other banking accounts. If you use that biometric card in conjunction with your smartphone, the biometric card is secure, and we call it cold storage because it's never connected to the internet. If the last step to unlock my bank account is to validate that I am indeed Vince and hold my biometric card against my phone, I get that much more security.
Just this week, we announced a partnership with Reltime, and they're really the first company that's building this multipurpose, multi-use card to realize the IDEX vision for our full turnkey platform. With this Reltime card, it's a full EMV payment card. It also can be used for cold storage for cryptocurrencies and digital currencies and also has the biometric authentication for unlocking either access to apps on your phone or your PC or laptop. It's really exciting to see the first one come to market that realizes that full vision, and we anticipate launching other customers with that same type of application.
Noteworthy was today we actually received yesterday, but announced today a very large purchase order, in fact, the largest purchase order in the history of IDEX, with a very large customer that's been an ongoing customer for IDEX, but this customer is actually in this digital authentication, digital access business. This is a large global company that has been a customer for us for over a year, and they're seeing growth in this market as well and just placed the biggest order, purchase order on IDEX, the biggest one in our company's history. I'm very happy to have that increase in the business. Let me talk a little bit about our competitive advantages. I think it's important to discuss what's different about IDEX in a market this big and this large.
Of course, there'll be competitors, and there'll be emerging competitors coming after the marketplace. IDEX has a very disruptive card architecture. When we decided to pivot towards the payment card, biometric payment card or biometric card marketplace, we put a lot of effort and time into R&D and came up with a patent-protected disruptive card architecture and all based on our trusted biosensor architecture. It's a disruptive architecture approach. It enables a disruptive card cost. It enables seamless or the best performance in the industry, therefore a seamless user experience, which is really what matters. We also have versatile enrollment options. We can enroll via a sleeve that you receive at home and plug the card in and enroll in a sleeve.
You can enroll using an app on your smartphone and very soon we will have other more seamless enrollment options out there, and we're working with the major banking schemes on getting those fielded as well. It's a flexible and comprehensive solution, including the operating system and applets to enable other applications such as the medical cards or access control or crypto wallets. Again, I think there'll be more and more applications coming out with this flexible system. We talk a little bit about some of our differentiation and why it matters for user experience. IDEX has the largest sensor in the industry with our architecture. Because our large sensor is made of a low-cost polymer material, we can build this large sensor and still keep the cost down.
In this industry, size does matter because the larger the sensor area, the more data you capture from the fingerprint every time you touch that. What are the benefits there? Well, it makes the enrollment process simpler and more reliable. It gives us the opportunity to have industry-leading security and forms of anti-spoofing, and we still have end-to-end transactions in one half a second. Again, more data is captured, so it improves the user experience. All of this is really important. We're now exceeding the performance requirements in terms of security with Visa and Mastercard, but both of these big payment scheme networks are continuously raising the bar on security levels.
It's an interesting conflict because when they make the security requirements more difficult, the user experience generally would go down because the false reject rate on the card would inevitably go up. Because we have this large sensor area and are able to capture more data with each touch, we're able to react to those increased security requirements and still enable a very high performance user experience at the same time. Suffice to say, we have a very differentiated product and we believe we can keep a lead in the marketplace. Many of you are already aware that we have done this complete turnkey solution together with Infineon, as I talked about, alluded to earlier. This includes Infineon's latest generation SLC38 secure element chip, our TrustedBio Max product.
The full solution includes a card operating system and custom inlay. We have many design wins for this already that are announced, and we now have additional 6 in the pipeline, and these are design wins that are announced globally. You know, we continue to make progress on this, so we've talked about this in the past just to give an update of where things are. We are now at the point where we're able to provide customers with sample cards that actually function with the full card operating system and the full turnkey solution. Those customers that adopted early will probably be in the pilot phase during Q4 of this year. As soon as we're able to clear certifications with Visa and Mastercard, those cards will come to market commercially.
Based on prior experience, it's very difficult to predict exactly how long the certifications will take with Visa and Mastercard, but we expect cards with this new full platform to be in production in the first half of next year. This is really paying off for us. We continue to build momentum with more and more design wins each quarter. We've talked about this in the past. It's very important to work with partners and collaborate with partners in the ecosystem here. The payment card ecosystem is quite complicated and therefore we can't cover it all alone. For this full turnkey platform solution, we work with several suppliers of secure elements.
We currently work with a secure element with Infineon, also with the IDEMIA secure element and with Zwipe who is a partner as well and have their own secure element chip they license from IDEMIA. A big part of the card makeup is really based on the interconnect, the EMV module, and the rest of the components that go into putting together this tiny electronic device that is a biometric card. Linxens is the global leader in the industry for these interconnect technologies, including advanced inlays with the NFC antenna designs.
They're the global leader in the EMV contact plate modules, which include the secure element chips. We announced during the quarter our collaboration with Linxens as well, and together with Linxens, we can supply all the parts of the card to the card manufacturers, basically everything but the ink. The beauty of collaborating with Linxens on this as a partner is that Linxens is already a supplier, the largest supplier in the world, to all of these card makers. We're very happy to have this collaboration together with Linxens. It's really gonna help accelerate the adoption of this full platform. Obviously, we target all the card manufacturers. On the back end of this, it's also very important to have collaboration partners on the back end, including personalization bureaus and payment processors.
One of the things we learned with some of the early launches is you need to have this seamless end-to-end ecosystem ready to go so that the user experience at the end of the day is seamless. The person that gets issued a biometric card has no idea how complex the ecosystem is behind that card. It's really up to all of us in this ecosystem to make that behave seamlessly. Again, through all these partnerships, we can address more than 70% of the total payment card market, and we have additional cooperations and partnerships in the pipeline that will even expand that number further. Let's talk about performance highlights over the first half of the year. We have had several launches.
We still anticipate several more to come towards the end of this year. It's already August, so we're still planning to see 10 launches or more from our early customers, IDEMIA and Zwipe. Therefore, we anticipate several more bank launches to come out this year. Again, a lot of that is out of our control, but from everything we're told, those bank launches are not canceled. Most of them have just been delayed for various reasons, and we anticipate seeing those this year. If they slip into next year, it still could happen, but those banks will eventually launch, and we're very confident about that.
We have currently certified cards out there in production with several suppliers, so several partners, and we anticipate many of the cards together with the Infineon platform to start coming out into the marketplace for pilots later this year and full certified production early in 2023. These are global. It's really great to see this global momentum building. Many of you have seen that we talked about E-Kart in Q1 as a design win for this turnkey card, and now we were happy to hear that E-Kart has already signed up a card issuer as a partner in Turkey. As soon as the card is ready and certified, this card issuer will be ready to bring the card out to customers.
We're working closely with E-Kart and other issuers in Turkey and anticipate we'll be able to announce even more behind that one in the coming months. Let's talk about the quarter. First on the positive news side, the revenue trends are definitely positive. We continue to grow. We sustain shipments in digital authentication space, and as you saw today, we had a large order in that space. I want to address the margin topic head on. Obviously, our margins in this quarter are much lower than our long-term target goals, but largely this was expected. We did contracts with our first few customers over two years ago on biometric cards and what the pricing would be for our modules in the early days.
At that time, we anticipated that when cards first launch in the early days, our margins would get squeezed. In our industry, your pricing with your suppliers is all based on volume. In the very early days, we're fairly low volume, so we're paying a high price that was always planned in. In order to help activate the market, we committed to very low pricing, volume pricing with our first customers. We took purchase orders for those very early on. Now, we're at the point where the industry is in a big shortage. We have had our suppliers raise pricing on us two times, and then we additionally paid expedite fees in order to get product allocated to us, in the chip shortage times.
At the end of the day, we knew we were gonna have very squeezed margins for a few quarters. We anticipate those margins will bounce back as soon as Q4. We are working on that, both on passing on some price increases to our customers. Our product mix will change, so with the introduction of product coming out from our full turnkey platform, we will improve margins there as well. You'll see our margins start to bounce back for us, and we expect to see that as soon as Q4 of this year. Our long-term projections for margins have not changed. Because of uncertainties in the marketplace, we have done some cost reduction initiatives in the company. We started this actually much earlier.
These are not new now, but throughout the year, we've been slowly reducing costs, and we're reducing our spend on R&D. When you think about IDEX as a company, when we made the pivot to the biometric payment card, we were very focused on R&D and invention and filing of new patents. Now we have the technology, we have a good leadership position, we need a strong engineering team to keep that roadmap going, but we don't need that same level of intensity of R&D and development. We've been able to reduce headcount on R&D and reduce expenses, and we're targeting reducing those expenses at least 15% and we will continue to work on cost reduction measures in the quarters going forward. In terms of the commercial engagements, again, this is still a growing pipeline.
Beyond the engagements we've already announced and talked about, there's many things still in the pipeline and our commercial team is out there constantly calling on new card manufacturers, banks, and processors and payment schemes, and there are many customers and potential customers in the pipeline. In fact, our team has talked to over 150 banks about this, trying to create demand and demand pull. We continue to see momentum in the industry, and we expect the market just to grow. In terms of our operating leverage long-term, as I said, we don't see any change in our long-term operating model. The margins will improve towards 50% when we get scale, and potentially even higher than that.
Again, that will come with product mix and with volume, and our differentiated product will allow us to grow and still achieve that 50% margin goal. We expect 30% operating margins in sustainable cash flow. We don't need to grow our headcount dramatically. This is a very small customer base, relatively speaking, and you can have a reasonable size commercial team to attack a very large opportunity. We expect the company to be able to grow and scale very quickly when the market finally does take off. In summary, IDEX is addressing a massive market opportunity, and we're seeing signs that it is starting to take off, not only for payments, but in cyber authentication and digital access and digital currencies.
We have a disruptive product that enables a disruptive overall system cost, and while we are hoping that this market inflection point comes to us sooner, we do believe we're positioned to really capture the market at inflection point and really grow the business quickly when that finally does happen. Thank you very much for listening to our Q2 presentation, and I wish you all a good day. Thanks again.