Welcome to the IDEX Biometrics second quarter 2021 earnings release presentation. The presentation today will be held by our CEO, Vince Graziani. Please go ahead, Vince.
Thank you, Marianne, and thank you to everybody who has connected in today for our first half results report. With that brief introduction, let's just dive right in. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending where you are in the world today watching this. I should first acknowledge the usual disclaimers regarding any financial presentation, and then we can move on quickly to give a little bit of an introduction to IDEX. My main goal today is to highlight some of the major developments we had in the most recent quarter. In case there are some folks on the line who have not seen this IDEX story in prior quarters or did not know the background, at IDEX Biometrics, we like to say that we're enabling the next evolution in payment cards.
As a business model, IDEX Biometrics is a fabless semiconductor company, for the most part. We would have a similar business model to a Broadcom or an NVIDIA or, those of you in the Nordics, a Nordic Semiconductor, where we develop semiconductor chips. In our case, we also develop sensors in specialized packaging, and we develop software and firmware and algorithms to go around that and sell this as a technology bundle for certain applications. The applications we're going after, our total solution was to enable the addition of fingerprint biometric authentication to battery-less credit card form factor devices. The most obvious one is the payment card. Why do we say that it's the next natural evolution of payment cards? If you know any of the history of payment cards, they started out, the first technology introduced was a mag stripe.
Cards were then very susceptible to fraud. People got smart and added encryption chips, and the smart card was introduced with chip and PIN. It more or less eliminated card-present fraud. Fast-forward multiple years later, and people wanted more convenience, so the contactless card was introduced. Contactless cards are very convenient. You can just hold the card over a terminal. The card harvests enough energy from the terminal to power up and approve your transaction. Unfortunately, with that convenient transaction, fraud creeps back into the picture because you don't have any PIN, you don't have any signature, and amount of fraud was starting to increase again. Enter the biometric payment card, and this is where IDEX comes into play. We enable a full solution that allows you to have your fingerprint biometric stored from home, encrypted and stored only on the card.
Then the user experience at payment terminal is that same exact convenient tap-and-go transaction you have with a contactless card, except now with the protection of your fingerprint biometrics at a much, much more secure transaction. So it reduces fraud. It also has identity protection. Your fingerprint is only on the card in encrypted form, nowhere in the cloud. For banks and issuers, the more secure card offers a top-of-wallet effect. Customers will use these cards ahead of others. IDEX enables very low cost and it's overall a very convenient transaction, and we'll talk a lot more about that as we go. That's a quick intro to IDEX and who we are. I suspect many of the folks on the line already know a lot about the company from prior presentations. I'd like to go quickly through the Q2 financial summary.
If you look at the numbers for Q2, the main messages are that you'll see we continue to grow revenues, product-based revenues. The company's been in business for a long time, and in the past we had some NREs. We had some license-based revenue. Now, primarily the source of our revenues are product-based. The second message here is that those product-based revenues are increasingly growing from the payment card space, which is our major target market, for high growth, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well. Other to note is we are starting to hit some of that growth that we have talked about in prior quarters. The revenues for the first half of the year, in total, exceed the entire year for 2020. We have increased order backlog going into the back half of the year as well.
Things are going quite well on the revenue generation front. On the OpEx side, we're more or less flat on a sequential basis. You'll see the OpEx is basically under control. We've had some very small, incremental headcount additions, primarily focused on the commercialization efforts and the operations side as we're starting to ramp up production. We do have a slight increase in our overall quarterly OpEx that's related to our U.S. NASDAQ listing that happened during first quarter of this year. One other comment I think I should make, because it sticks out, if you look at this chart, is that quarter two of 2021, the most recent quarter was a little bit higher than quarter two of 2020. I think I should just make a comment on quarter two 2020 OpEx. That was my first quarter in the company.
It was also the quarter when COVID-19 hit in March. As soon as COVID hit, we took some drastic one-time expense cuts because we weren't certain what COVID impact was going to be on any business, as most CEOs were. In addition, during that quarter, we also realized some R&D tax credits. Q2 2020 was sort of an anomaly on the low side of OpEx. Overall, we're doing quite well managing expenses. Our cash balance is roughly $20 million, so we're in good shape there on cash balance. Hopefully, and not just hopefully, we plan to have much more to talk about on the financial side in the quarters to come as the business continues to ramp. Let's talk about some of the highlights on the investment side. Just as reminders for those that may be new, IDEX is addressing a massive market opportunity.
When you look at the payment card market, there are 5 billion new smart cards generated every year. IDEX is one of only two suppliers that are providing fingerprint technology for biometric smart cards. Looking at various analysts, the industry analysts are now predicting that biometric smart cards will be about 400 million units per year by 2024. This represents still below 10% of the total market penetration for biometrics, but it shows that it's a very sizable TAM. For IDEX, if you want to think about revenue generation, our solution is about $3.50 ASP per card. We've just introduced our TrustedBio solution. We're going to talk more about that briefly in a minute, but the TrustedBio is really the only pure-play contactless fingerprint authentication solution.
What I mean by pure play is, starting in late 2017, IDEX set out to build an optimized solution for the card form factor. Our sensor is flexible. Our technology is designed and optimized for the battery-less operation inside a card. Very low power, very efficient and very highly integrated in order to get the cost down. We'll talk about more about this, but we are the first solution that really enables a cost point that will help allow market activation to have this market really take off. That's actually proven out by some of our accelerating commercial momentum. We've announced in the quarter a partnership between Infineon and IDEX. We're going to talk a lot more about that in a coming slide here. We're already seeing high demand for this Infineon IDEX reference platform solution.
None of the companies are at the point where we're ready to make announcements, but we have several pending design wins with well-known companies globally that are very interested in signing up to leverage this reference platform developed by IDEX and our partner, Infineon. We do have a growing backlog from our existing customers. We have some customers who partnered with us very early, like IDEMIA, and those customers are already in the market and marketing their product and starting to ramp. We have multiple new design wins pending, and there'll be more announcements coming in the coming months. We do have also opportunities in adjacent markets. When you think about this biometrically protected card, there starts to be other applications you can consider.
One of the big ones for us, we've talked about in the last several quarters, is the Digital Currency Electronic Payment initiative in China, which is their central bank-backed digital currency initiative. We'll talk more about that. Also when you think about hardware wallets for cryptocurrencies or IDs or data access control, or the same card actually performing all of these functions at the same time is also possible. We are also getting volume production orders from a major Asian customer in one of these adjacent markets as well. We have the large-scale certifications from the big Mastercard and other payment networks, including China UnionPay. We are anticipating in the coming weeks a Visa certification. All the major payment networks have tested and certified IDEX-based biometric technology. Good overall momentum in the company.
If we go to the next slide, this is really the major points that I wanted to talk about, because as I mentioned, I joined the company on March 1st, 2020, and since I've been here, I think in the whole history of the company, this is probably the most important quarter in terms of commercial milestones the company has ever had. We've been talking about our solution, TrustedBio, for well over a year, almost two years now, and we're finally at the point where our first major customer, IDEMIA, is actively marketing their biometric card based on our technology. We have some significant orders from IDEMIA. This card will be the best performing card in the industry by far, and we have building order backlog, and we anticipate future growth and continued benefit from this customer and partner. We recently announced our partnership with Infineon.
It's both technical and commercial partnership. With Infineon, they're taking advantage of the full TrustedBio solution, including the sensor and all of our software and integrated functions. I'll speak more to that one because that's worth some more mention. Infineon, by the way, for those who don't know the company, has been the leading provider of secure element chips to the smart card, payment card industry for more than two decades. We couldn't ask for a better partner in this industry to help us go to market here with a full biometric card solution. This solution, by the way, is also one of the best performing solutions in the industry. We have transactions three times faster than cards out in the market today. What that means is a full EMV payment transaction in about a half a second.
For the user experience, no change from a standard contactless card. That's really going to be a big deal for user adoption and acceptance of biometric cards. People are happy to have the security of the biometric, but they want that same tap-and-go payment transaction that they're used to with current contactless cards. Our TrustedBio Max product was also launched. I'll talk more about that as well. This is the most advanced and highly integrated member of the TrustedBio product family. I'll talk about that in great detail, but that is the product that's being leveraged in the IDEX Infineon reference platform. We're progressing as planned on our digital currency initiatives in China, and we talk more about that in a coming slide as well.
Overall, these commercial highlights from the quarter really do drive the point home that this is probably the most important quarter in the whole history of the company at IDEX. Next slide. Let's talk more about TrustedBio Max, the product that we introduced, because it allows us to talk a little bit more about IDEX as a company. When you think about IDEX, you think about many semiconductor companies. In many cases, they're largely just component providers. In the case of IDEX, we're much different. We provide total solutions. We build the sensor itself. We also build the complicated ASIC that drives the sensor. That ASIC has a high-end ARM processor embedded, a power management unit, specialized hardware that we've developed to accelerate our own matching algorithm for biometric match. We do all of that hardware development.
Not only that hardware development, we have a team that does all these high-end algorithms for biometric matching and anti-spoof, so protection against fake fingerprints. We have quite a sophisticated algorithm and system engineering team as well. Beyond, we provide full system solutions. We have a team that works on the card layout designs and works with card inlay providers so that we can provide a full turnkey solution to our customers, including devices for the enrollments. As many of you already know, IDEX has patents on the enrollment sleeve that enables in-home enrollment of your fingerprints. Our technology is so advanced, we are working also on ways to minimize the number of touches for enrollment to make the enrollment process more convenient for the user at home.
We also have an option to enroll via the smartphone, a smartphone app for those that want to do that. With IDEX TrustedBio, we would see a home enrollment could happen on five or six touches. If you look at some of the fingerprint sensors that are out there, they require many more touches, which is an inconvenience for the user, especially at startup. Overall, it's a fantastic and highly integrated system solution. I wanted to repeat the message that TrustedBio is actually a whole family of products. TrustedBio Max is the high end of that family. Basically, what we have is a hardware and software platform that allows us through firmware to launch various products on the same platform.
When you think about IDEX in that way, you think very differently about the company, where the TrustedBio platform today supports various types of secure element architectures. That same platform with different applications running even on the same card can support an app for a crypto wallet or an app for a hardware wallet for a central bank digital currency and an app for digital access control. It really changed your whole thinking about what's possible in that card form factor. The same form factor, many applications adding value every step of the way. Let's talk a little bit more about the Infineon IDEX reference platform that we've done together. This was a pretty exciting platform.
We have been working on this together with Infineon for well over a year, and we're excited that we finally got to the point where both companies were ready to unveil all this effort that we have put in over the last year. On the IDEX side, we are contributing the TrustedBio Max product and all the related software and firmware, our full biometric matching algorithm technology, which takes advantage of our hardware accelerator in our biometric ASIC. We have a 200 MHz ARM processor device integrated into our sensor ASIC, and we developed a full software development kit for users. Together with Infineon, this is leveraging their latest generation secure element chip, the SLC38. This is a very advanced secure element, high processing power.
It's running on a 40 nm node and has significant amount of memory on board, which allows us to add these other applications that we talked about into the same platform. Overall, the system is integrated. We're demonstrating significant performance. We do our biometric match in under approximately 250 ms. The full EMV transaction, including biometric match, is about one-half a second, it integrates all of our presentation attack detection, which is basically ability to detect fake fingerprints, also a core technology from IDEX, we have a false rejection rate well below 3%. This solution finally hits the point of performance and overall card cost that we believe, and as does Infineon, will help enable the overall card market to take off.
When I say Infineon also believes in that, I will say that about a week and a half ago, Infineon did their quarterly results conference call, the Infineon CEO Reinhard Ploss mentioned this as one of the key highlights of the quarter for Infineon as well, the IDEX and Infineon partnership and the expectations they have for growth in the biometric card market as a result of this team-up with IDEX. I encourage you to go pull up that Infineon quarterly release transcript and read it. It's quite a good quote. Moving on to the Digital Currency Electronic Payment initiative in China. We're making progress there as anticipated. As a reminder, China had declared that they want to lead the world in digital currency.
They want to replace the renminbi with a digital version of renminbi, which is a cryptocurrency, blockchain-based, but it is controlled by the Central Bank of China. Then it's distributed to users by the six major regional banks. These major regional banks have started during the first half of this year, running pilots with various experiments on this whole digital payment initiative. So there are different types of payment. There's a digital wallet that can exist on a smartphone. There's a hardware wallet, and the hardware wallet is meant to service the people that don't have smartphones. About 40% of the total population in China today do not have access to smartphones. This is where IDEX comes in. When you consider a digital hardware wallet will actually have cryptocurrency stored there, you need to protect that in order to deter the motivation for theft.
This is where the fingerprint biometrics comes in. IDEX has partnered with all the main card manufacturers in China that have signed on to participate in the Digital Currency Electronic Payment initiative. Several of our customers have already announced, including Chutian Dragon, that they have participated with IDEX. Also, Goldpac has recently made an announcement, as well as our partner Hengbao. We've already announced some early trials with two of the major banks, and we anticipate announcing more trials to come in the coming weeks and quarters. One other thing to remind people of, this initiative is moving very quickly in China, and it is going to happen. They have a plan to allow only Digital Currency Electronic Payment as the currency at the Winter Olympics coming up in less than six months from now in Beijing in 2022.
You'll see this market accelerate much more quickly. Even when I joined IDEX, this was not even part of our target addressable market. Clearly, it represents an opportunity for more than NOK 1 billion of upside on top of the traditional payment market that we were targeting here in the West. A big opportunity. Those were the main points we wanted to talk about this quarter. I think just to remind on the investment highlights for IDEX, it is a massive addressable market, and I think the more you understand about the capabilities of our TrustedBio product family, then the addressable markets become even bigger. We're demonstrating accelerating commercial momentum. We have large-scale certifications and validation from partners like IDEMIA, Infineon, and others. We have opportunities in some of these other adjacent markets, including crypto, digital currency ID, et cetera.
I think we're just at the cusp. We're looking forward to some exciting quarters to come. With that, I'd like to say thank you all for tuning in and listening. If you have further questions or would like to dig in deeper, please contact our investor relations, Marianne Bøe, who introduced me at the beginning of this call, and we'd be happy to set up some time and answer more questions for you. Thanks very much.