For decades, fingerprinting in the United States has looked largely the same. Whether for employment or travel screening, healthcare onboarding, professional licensing, or volunteer background checks, the process has required people to travel to a physical location, place their fingers on specialized hardware, and wait for results. It works, but it is inconvenient, costly for providers, and often inaccessible to people in rural or underserved communities.

Meanwhile, nearly every other part of our lives has gone mobile. Banking, healthcare, travel, workforce onboarding, licensing, and identity verification increasingly happen on a smartphone, along with many of the high-trust interactions that once required in-person presence. The disconnect is obvious: in a digital-first world, why is one of our most trusted identity signals still bound to a purpose-built device and a physical location?

Touchless, or contactless, fingerprinting — capturing high-quality fingerprint images using a mobile phone device — offers a compelling answer. It promises a future where secure biometric identity verification and enrollment can happen anywhere, without bulky hardware, and without compromising accuracy or trust. For years, that future has been technologically possible but institutionally out of reach.

That is now changing.

The United States is approaching a pivotal moment in the evolution of biometric identity: the long-awaited path toward operational use of contactless fingerprints in the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is finally taking shape. While there is still work ahead, the momentum is real, and the implications for industry, government, and everyday citizens are profound.

Why Standards Come First

In the criminal justice and public safety ecosystem, innovation does not begin with a product. It begins with a standard.

Every fingerprint submitted to the FBI flows through a tightly governed pipeline designed for interoperability, accuracy, and trust. At the center of that pipeline is the ANSI/NIST biometric data exchange standard — the nationally recognized framework developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – which defines how fingerprint images and metadata are formatted and transmitted across systems. The FBI’s Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification (EBTS) builds on this foundation to power NGI.

Currently, that standard assumes one thing: fingerprints are captured by contact-based sensors.

For nearly a decade, standards bodies, government agencies, and industry partners have been working to change that. The forthcoming ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2025 revision formally introduces support for contactless fingerprint images. This is not a marketing milestone — it is a structural one. It establishes, for the first time, a universal data model that allows contactless fingerprints to be treated as first-class citizens in national biometric systems.

This important first step is nearing completion. With the standard entering its final stages of approval, the technical foundation for contactless interoperability is effectively in place.

But standards alone do not make a system operational.

The CJIS and NGI Adoption Path

The second step is adoption by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division, which governs NGI. This is where theory becomes practice.

NGI supports hundreds of millions of records and underpins critical law enforcement and public safety functions. Any change must be carefully evaluated for data quality, matching performance, and operational risk.

That evaluation is now underway.

The FBI has been preparing a Contactless Fingerprinting Pilot to assess how touchless images perform within NGI workflows. This effort aligns with NIST’s best-practice guidance on how contactless fingerprints can be encoded using existing record structures. Together, these initiatives signal a meaningful shift: contactless fingerprinting is no longer hypothetical in the US — it is being actively tested in the environment that matters most.

There is no public timeline for CJIS to formally update EBTS or authorize operational submissions. Historically, this step can take time. But the direction is clear:

• The data standard is nearly finalized.
• The FBI is piloting contactless workflows.
• The ecosystem is aligning around a shared technical model.

This is what progress looks like in a system designed for trust.

Over the next several years, this will likely unfold in familiar stages: a finalized ANSI/NIST standard, expanded FBI pilot activity, and eventual updates to EBTS that allow contactless submissions into NGI. Each step is deliberate, and each one brings contactless fingerprinting closer to operational reality.

What This Means for Industry

In 2023 alone, the FBI’s CJIS received and processed approximately 74 million fingerprint submissions — a mix of criminal and civil background checks encompassing everything from law enforcement activity to routine employment screenings, professional licensing, volunteer vetting, and other authorized uses that require a secure match against national biometric records. This volume underscores the massive scale of biometric identity verification in the United States.

When CJIS ultimately enables contactless fingerprint submissions, the impact will extend far beyond law enforcement.

Background checks touch nearly every sector:

• Employers verifying new hires
• Hospitals onboarding clinicians
• Aviation entities vetting personnel for secure access
• Financial institutions meeting KYC/AML obligations
• Government agencies enrolling program participants
• Nonprofits screening volunteers

Today, these processes depend on physical locations, specialized equipment, and appointment-based workflows. They are expensive to scale and difficult to extend to remote and underserved populations.

Contactless fingerprinting changes that equation due to the ubiquity of mobile smartphone devices.  Over 9 in 10 Americans own a smartphone today.

It enables secure biometric enrollment and verification using devices people already own, allowing organizations to reach individuals who cannot easily travel. It reduces infrastructure costs while preserving the rigor of biometric identity.

In practical terms, it means background checks that can happen at home, in the field, or at the point of need, without sacrificing the integrity of the underlying systems.

This is not about replacing trust. It is about extending it.

Contactless fingerprint capture on a mobile device using the ONYX SDK.

ONYX and a Future That Is Already Here

At Telos, we have spent years preparing for this moment.

ONYX® was built on the premise that high-quality, machine-matchable fingerprints could be captured using a mobile device camera — without hardware, without friction, and without compromise. It produces NIST-quality images, integrates liveness detection and AI-driven guidance, and has already been deployed in large-scale national identity programs around the world. These are not proofs of concept; they are operational systems serving real populations where mobile touchless fingerprinting is already in use by millions both in government and commercial contexts.

The same capabilities that make ONYX effective globally are precisely what the U.S. ecosystem has been waiting for:

• Standards-aligned fingerprint imagery
• High-fidelity capture in uncontrolled environments
• Mobile-first deployment at scale
• Seamless integration into existing workflows

ONYX was engineered around the same principles that govern NGI: data quality, interoperability, and trust at national scale.

When CJIS opens the door to contactless submissions, the question will not be whether the technology exists. It will be who is ready.

Telos is ready.

An Inflection Point, Not an Endpoint

It is important to be clear: touchless fingerprinting is not yet operationally accepted by NGI. The final CJIS step remains ahead. But this moment represents an inflection point.

For years, contactless fingerprinting lived in the space between innovation and infrastructure. It was technically viable but institutionally out of reach. Today, the standards are maturing, pilots are forming, and the path is visible.

This is how meaningful change happens in national systems: deliberately, methodically, and with an uncompromising commitment to trust.

The transition from physical scanners to mobile capture will not happen overnight. But when it does, it will redefine how identity works in the United States, making secure fingerprint-based background checks more accessible, more efficient, and more humane.

For the first time, the technical, institutional, and operational layers of the ecosystem are moving in the same direction.

The future of fingerprinting is touchless. And it is closer than ever. 

Preparation now will determine who is ready when that future arrives.