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Quarterly Close (Listen Only)
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More information here.
Quarterly Close
I couldn’t wait to share this Google Lyria song, “Quarterly Close.” (Public Domain, of course.)
I will be using this song in a video that will be posted to the Bredemarket blog, to my Facebook and LinkedIn Bredemarket pages, and on my Bredemarket YouTube channel.
But you’ll have to wait to see it.
Until Monday, June 29, 2026 at 6:00 am Pacific Daylight Time.
In other words…near the quarterly close.
The SWOT Matrix (Alternate Reel)
Alternate edit of the reel I shared earlier today, letting you know at the outset that “the matrix” is a SWOT analysis.
“Market Equilibrium” from Google Lyria. Public Domain.
For more information, read
On Threats
Ask about threats so you can act on them.
If you didn’t already realize it, “the matrix” is a SWOT matrix. And since SWOT includes weaknesses and threats, it’s not pretty.
“Whenever a product marketer asks a generative AI engine to prepare a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)…the PMM is intentionally asking for negative weakness and threat information.”
The weaknesses are bad enough, but the threats are truly debilitating because you have less control over them.
“In a SWOT analysis, threats are external factors that are beyond your control and pose challenges to your business. Factors like increased competition, economic volatility, evolving regulatory landscapes, or even changing market trends are examples of threats.”
But once you ASK what the threats are, you can ACT on them.
- If the threats affect you but not your competitors, you can plan for them and try to mitigate them.
- If they affect your competitors but not you, you can take temporary advantage of them while no one else is paying attention.
- And if they affect everyone in your industry, you may (or may not) want to launch industry wide lobbying efforts.
But you can’t do anything if you refuse to recognize the threats.
Bredemarket provides expert SWOT analyses and other analyses for identity, biometric, and technology firms.
Schedule a free meeting with Bredemarket to discuss your needs while I ask probing questions.
Or just blow the whole thing off and watch some videos.
The Matrix
The matrix need not terrorize you.
Unless your SWOT analysis matrix yields weaknesses and threats that are debilitating.
It’s easy to list your strengths, but honestly assessing your product weaknesses and your market threats requires an objective, expert eye who knows the industry. If you misdiagnose your matrix, you risk building a strategy on quicksand.
Bredemarket provides expert SWOT analyses and other analyses for identity, biometric, and technology firms.
Schedule a free meeting with Bredemarket to discuss your needs while I ask probing questions.
When Acronyms Get Nasty
I think someone was trying to make a political point here.
34 USC 61101 was created under the Trump Administration-supported One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). It is administered within the U.S. Department of Justice and provides state and local entities with federal reimbursement funds for particular purposes.
The Attorney General shall use amounts appropriated or otherwise made available for the Fund for grants to eligible States, State agencies, and units of local government, pursuant to their existing statutory authorities, for any of the following purposes:
(1) Locating and apprehending aliens who have committed a crime under Federal, State, or local law, in addition to being unlawfully present in the United States.
(2) Collection and analysis of law enforcement investigative information within the United States to counter gang or other criminal activity.
(3) Investigating and prosecuting-
(A) crimes committed by aliens within the United States; and
(B) drug and human trafficking crimes committed within the United States.
(4) Court operations related to the prosecution of-
(A) crimes committed by aliens; and
(B) drug and human trafficking crimes.
(5) Temporary criminal detention of aliens.
(6) Transporting aliens described in paragraph (1) within the United States to locations related to the apprehension, detention, and prosecution of such aliens.
(7) Vehicle maintenance, logistics, transportation, and other support provided to law enforcement agencies by a State agency to enhance the ability to locate and apprehend aliens who have committed crimes under Federal, State, or local law, in addition to being unlawfully present in the United States.
Oh, and the fund has a name.
It’s called the “Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide Reimbursement” Fund.
Or, if you just want to use the acronym, it’s “BIDEN.”
By a remarkable coincidence, the predecessor to the current U.S. President has the last name “BIDEN.”
I haven’t researched to see if the current administration has established funds with the acronyms OBAMA or HILLARY.
Shout It From the Mountaintops
When I first heard about the “Florida man” facial recognition mismatch, I couldn’t tell whether the relevant police entity had arrested him based upon the facial recognition results alone, which is a big no-no. (Repeat after me: “investigative lead.”)
Chris Burt of Biometric Update repeated this:
“Shout it from the mountaintops: Probable cause cannot come from facial recognition alone.”
In his article, he also noted that the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is cracking down on the relevant police entity:
“PCSO says in its response that it has entered into an MoU requiring [the relevant entity] to send its officers for training on facial recognition before they are allowed to use the system…”
Bid Evaluation Criteria Disregarded
If you’ve ever responded to a Request for Proposal for a technical product, you know that the RFP often has mandatory criteria. If you don’t meet all of the mandatory requirements, you’re not going to win.
Unless you do.
I am not going to name the vendor who submitted this proposal for two reasons:
- The alleged corruption in this bid may not have affected the vendor in question, but the vendor’s in-country agents. And yes, I know you have to select your agents carefully, but sometimes it’s impossible for vendors to know what the agents are doing.
- As the article indicates, the vendor in question was not the only one to receive corruption allegations. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
Back to the bid, which was for an identity system in Nepal. At least two foreign companies bid on the system. The article describes the bid from one of those companies.
The technical sub-committee found that [THE VENDOR’S] bid for both packages failed to meet the required technical criteria. Specifically, in Package 1, [THE VENDOR] did not satisfy any of the 238 required technical specifications. In Package 2, the company fell short of 50 of 297 listed technical requirements.
Normally, if you meet exactly 0 out of 238 mandatory requirements, you don’t get an award.
Despite these findings, the evaluation committee overrode the technical sub-committee’s recommendations and allowed [THE VENDOR] to advance to the financial round. This directly contradicts Nepal’s Public Procurement Act, which mandates that only technically compliant bids may proceed. One member of the technical sub-committee withdrew his signature from the final evaluation report two weeks after it was submitted, indicating internal dissent within the department’s own review process.
The non-compliant vendor actually won the award…but there were a lot of questions. And action was subsequently taken.
The department’s latest procurement, a five-year contract worth approximately Rs 7.66 billion awarded to two…firms, triggered a prolonged legal and regulatory battle before culminating in the arrest of the department’s own director general on June 15, 2026.
Yes, arrest.
Specifically, of the Director General of the Department of Passports, Tirtha Raj Aryal, who also chaired the five-member evaluation committee that waived the technical non-compliance.
For the entire messy story, see here.
And remember that when a proposal evaluation process is thoroughly documented, shady evaluation decisions will be found out.
Veriff on Age Verification With Birth Certificates
In the past, if you needed to check the age of a younger teenager or a child who didn’t have a driver’s license, you had two options:
- Estimate their age.
- Hope they had a passport.
While many (not all) people have a birth certificate, Veriff reminds us that digital age verification with a birth certificate is difficult.
“Processing civil documents at scale was once a legitimate operational nightmare. Birth certificates vary dramatically in format across states and countries, making manual extraction slow, inconsistent, and error-prone.”
Why the nightmare?
To examine the reasons for the birth certificate operational nightmare, let’s limit ourselves to the United States for the moment.
Driver’s licenses and similar IDs are challenging enough because they are issued by over 50 separate states and territories, and in several different formats (different driver license categories, non driver license IDs, plus special formats for minors and people below legal drinking age). So you’re talking about potentially thousands of formats.
But at least those are renewed every few years.
Birth certificate of a B.H. Obama II. From https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf
Birth certificates are often NOT renewed (although you could conceivably request a new copy). So as a state changes its birth certificate formats over the decades, it could go through multiple different formats. And in a few cities such as New York City, they issued their own birth certificates independently of the state.
To complicate things further, the security on birth certificates is rudimentary, or perhaps non-existent for older birth certificates. Compare to driver’s licenses which are always incorporating new security features. (And older driver’s licenses without those security features are no longer valid or accepted.)
In short, validating birth certificates is significantly harder than validating driver’s licenses, which is hard enough.
Can we verify birth certificates today?
Veriff says it’s becoming possible.
“Modern automated extraction technology changes that reality. What was once a processing bottleneck is now a scalable, deployable component of a serious compliance strategy.”
How?
“Unlike a standardized driver’s license with a predictable layout and a scannable barcode, birth certificates are heavily unstructured….Modern unstructured document technology eliminates this bottleneck. Advanced extraction tools use intelligent models to read and pull key details from complex civil documents, regardless of the layout. By accurately capturing the date of birth, parent or guardian information, and place of birth, these tools turn a clunky manual review process into a fast, scalable verification workflow.”
Apply enough processing power and enough smarts and you can solve anything.
Bredemarket 