Amongst the four consortia so far bidding for the UK Home Office’s pilot scheme for an automatic fingerprint recognition system – to be put on test by the Metropolitan Police and Hertfordshire Constabulary – is a group led by De la Rue Printek, part of the De La Rue Group Plc which specialises in fingerprint recognition systems: the other members are Crosfield Electronics, also part of De la Rue, which will provide its high performance Unix workstations, Digitus Ltd, working on the database, and Transputer accelerator specialist Niche Technology Ltd of Bristol: the main competition comes from the Logica/CAP AFTeC group.