SINGAPORE, 5 May 2026: Following a competitive bid process, Amadeus announced last week its intention to acquire IDEMIA Public Security (IPS), a leading biometrics and identity services provider headquartered in France.
IPS has a global footprint and a diversified customer base across the public and private sectors, and the EUR1.2 billion acquisition, upon closing, will further strengthen Amadeus’ biometric and identity capabilities by leveraging IPS’ market-leading technology, end-to-end platform, and strong global blue-chip client base. It will follow Amadeus’ 2024 acquisition of Vision-Box.
With trusted digital identity becoming a foundational layer across the end-to-end travel journey, and as biometric adoption quickly accelerates across the travel industry, this acquisition will accelerate Amadeus’ growth in airports and border verticals, enhancing its position in this space, underlining the company’s deliberate strategy to bring biometric identity capabilities into its core travel platform.
By integrating biometric capabilities with airline, airport, border, and hotel systems, Amadeus can support the next phase of automation, delivering more seamless, automated, and AI-enabled travel journeys while ensuring a secure identity layer is in place across the entire journey. A combined Amadeus-IPS offering will also drive further digitalisation of core travel processes, delivering faster, more secure interconnectivity among a range of stakeholders.
Biometrics enable instant identity verification, leading to faster processing, stronger security, and more efficient operations.
At the same time, this acquisition will increase Amadeus’ ability to connect touchpoints across the traveller journey, aligning it with its ambition to be an orchestrator of the travel ecosystem and enabling it to support a more integrated passenger journey from booking through airport processing and boarding.
“This demonstrates further our long‑term commitment to biometrics as part of our broader platform strategy. Alongside AI, biometrics is one of the most transformative technologies for delivering fast, convenient, and secure end‑to‑end traveller journeys. This will enable us to deliver our services across more traveller touch points, in turn reducing friction and improving the traveller experience, while supporting our ambition to expand biometric capabilities further, extending traveller ID throughout the journey,” said Amadeus President and CEO, Luis Maroto. “In a fast‑evolving AI world, the bridging of physical and digital identity will be critical for seamless travel. By combining Amadeus and IPS capabilities, we will be able to create more joined‑up travel journeys in the future, better connecting the travel ecosystem and linking the traveller to the different steps of the journey.”
The intended acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, with closing expected mid-2027.
There is an agreed earn‑out structure that supports long‑term value alignment between the parties, which could result in total consideration of EUR1.35 billion.
BNP Paribas is acting as the exclusive financial advisor to Amadeus
(Source: Amadeus)
