The deal would give the Spanish travel technology company a global footprint in biometric border control, airport identity systems, and law enforcement fingerprint databases

A passenger boarding a flight at one of the world’s 250 airports equipped with IDEMIA biometric gates does not think about who owns the face recognition system verifying their identity. Amadeus, the Spanish travel technology company that already processes its reservation, is about to own that too.

Amadeus agrees to acquire the public security division of French biometrics firm IDEMIA from private equity owner Advent International for $1.35 billion. The deal, announced on Wednesday, represents a significant expansion of Amadeus’s identity infrastructure ambitions, and a notable narrowing of the final price from the €2 billion to €3 billion valuation Advent had sought when it put the asset up for sale.

IDEMIA Public Security is a substantial business. It serves more than 600 government, state, and federal agencies globally, maintains biometric deployments across more than 250 airports supporting over one billion travellers annually, and operates fingerprint and criminal record processing infrastructure in partnership with the FBI.

It also supplies mobile driver’s licence programmes across multiple US states and provides border control biometric systems in dozens of countries. The unit employs approximately 3,800 people worldwide and holds the intellectual property for the biometric algorithms used across the wider IDEMIA group.

Amadeus, founded in 1987 by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS as a reservations technology provider, has spent the intervening decades building itself into the dominant global distribution system for air travel, controlling more than 40% of the GDS market.

In recent years it has been expanding beyond ticketing into airport operations technology. The most significant step was its €320 million acquisition of Vision-Box in 2024, the Portuguese company that builds biometric passenger processing systems.

IDEMIA Public Security would take that ambition considerably further. Where Vision-Box covers passenger-facing biometric kiosks at boarding gates, IDEMIA PS reaches into the full identity infrastructure stack: border control, law enforcement databases, civil identity document issuance, and digital identity credentials.

Adding it to Amadeus’s existing portfolio would create a vertically integrated airport technology player stretching from the moment a passenger books a ticket to the moment their face clears the border.

Advent International put IDEMIA on the block in 2023, originally seeking up to €6 billion for the full group. It subsequently split the business into three separate divisions. IDEMIA Smart Identity was acquired by French state-backed IN Groupe in a deal valued at up to €1 billion, completed in mid-2025. IDEMIA Public Security became the primary remaining asset. French defence company Thales also expressed interest in the asset during the sale process, though it does not appear to have prevailed.

The transaction is the latest in a wave of consolidation across the airport and identity technology sector, driven by the rapid expansion of biometric passenger processing and government digital identity programmes globally. IDEMIA Public Security regularly ranks at the top of NIST’s fingerprint algorithm evaluations, giving Amadeus a significant technical asset for US government and law enforcement markets alongside the travel industry.

For the EU specifically, the deal carries regulatory implications. IDEMIA’s public security capabilities touch some of the most sensitive areas of digital identity infrastructure: biometric surveillance at borders, national identity document issuance, and law enforcement databases.

A strategic acquisition of that infrastructure by a Spanish-headquartered company, ultimately dependent on regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions, will attract scrutiny from competition authorities and national security reviewers alike.

Amadeus reported revenues above €6.5 billion in fiscal 2025, up 6.1% year on year, with adjusted EBIT of €1.9 billion. The company recently announced a €500 million share repurchase programme, suggesting it entered the IDEMIA negotiations from a position of financial confidence.