STANDING on the top floor of IFSC House, Tom Grissen waves his hand towards a window overlooking the River Liffey and the bustling streets below. “Where else in the city are you going to get a view like that from your office? Just look at it, it’s fantastic,” says the genial American chief executive of Daon, the Dublin-based company which deals in biometrics, the science of measuring physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, DNA, or retinal patterns, for use in verifying identities.

It’s hard to argue with him. The view is the impressive, unbroken vista of the river winding its way from Matt Talbot bridge, at the Custom House, all the way down to Heuston station. Dublin looks pretty cosmopolitan from up here.

As it happens, it is not Grissen’s office. Daon is actually in the basement of the building. The work space, replete with oak-panelled walls, deep-pile red carpets and horseracing trophies, belongs to Dermot Desmond, his boss, who founded Daon six years ago.

Grissen’s easy manner in his chairman’s business nerve centre isn’t wishful thinking, though. It is a reflection of Daon’s high standing in Desmond’s sprawling business empire. The billionaire once described Daon as “one of the best companies I’ve ever been involved with”. Coming from a man whose latest deal saw him sell London City airport for a 2,900% profit, that is saying something.

“I’m delighted Dermot holds the company in such high regard. That’s a real honour considering some of the companies he has owned,” said Grissen. “He is the best chairman you could ask for. You couldn’t find a better boss. He founded the company and has an obvious interest in how things go, but he hired me to run it and lets me get on with it without interfering.”

So far the company seems on track to fulfil its founder’s high hopes. Daon is part of a consortium that is favourite to scoop a sizeable chunk of a $1.4 billion (€1.1 billion) US government biometrics contract, and is also believed to have just landed a European Union-wide deal to manage the biometric matching for a visa information system.

In the past couple of years it has bagged a hatful of other large contracts across the world, from Australia to Qatar to Ireland.

In the post-September 11, security-conscious world, biometrics is big business. Daon is already well placed to clean up in a market that, according to the research company Acuity Market Intelligence, could be worth $32 billion within five years.

What, though, does Daon — derived from the Irish word for people — actually do? “Our product is the glue that holds an identity management system together. When a fingerprint or iris is scanned, that information is handed to us.

“We check it against various criminal databases and government watch lists, make sure the person is who they say they are and manage the system overall,” said Grissen.

“The first big push to use biometrics has been by governments, for use with visas, border control and travel programmes. But soon you will see biometrics in all aspects of everyday life,” he said.

However, when I suggest that things may be heading the way of the futuristic film Blade Runner, Grissen simply gives a wry smile. He does, though, predict we will see biometrics applied to everything from the maintenance of healthcare records to opening doors and using credit cards.

“It is headed that way. The Wall Street Journal had an article once entitled Will it be cash, credit or fingerprint? That is certainly feasible one day. When biometrics starts to make things more convenient for customers, then it will be adopted,” he said. “The perception after 9/11 was that biometrics were incompatible with convenience, that it made travel slower and held everything up. But now systems are out there which show that it can help speed things along.