Biometric Update and Goode Intelligence recognize ROC among a select group of pioneering providers helping shape the emerging global age assurance market. The report highlights the rapid expansion of age assurance as governments and digital platforms move toward stronger, privacy-preserving ways to protect minors online. Global age assurance transactions are projected to exceed 9.8 billion annually by 2028, with market revenue surpassing $7.37 billion as adoption expands across social media, gaming, e-commerce, gambling, entertainment, and other age-restricted digital services.

What Makes an Age Assurance Pioneer?

ROC has been named an Age Assurance Pioneer in the 2026 Age Assurance & Digital Age Credentials Market Report from Biometric Update and Goode Intelligence. The report examines the rapidly evolving global market for age assurance, including regulation, technology, standards, testing, market forecasts, and the providers helping define the category.

Age Assurance Pioneers were selected from a candidate pool of more than 50 biometric age assurance vendors based on criteria including technical capabilities, business stability, market position, and contributions to the maturity of the field. Each Pioneer has undergone independent evaluation by an accredited biometrics laboratory, established a reputation as a credible biometric technology provider, and demonstrated a sustainable business model.

For ROC, this recognition reflects years of work advancing independently evaluated biometric AI for applications where accuracy, privacy, and trust are non-negotiable.

Age Assurance Is Entering a New Era

Age assurance is rapidly moving from a niche digital identity use case to an increasingly important layer of the online economy. The report points to accelerating regulation across the UK, Europe, Australia, the United States, and other markets as governments move beyond simple self-attestation and require more robust approaches to protecting minors online. Those requirements are expanding beyond adult content into social media, gaming, e-commerce, gambling, entertainment, dating, and even AI chatbots.

“At the same time, the technology itself is evolving. Traditional age verification and age estimation are increasingly being joined by reusable digital age credentials, wallet-based proofs, device-level signals, and broader trust frameworks designed to make age checks more private, interoperable, and easier to reuse across digital services.”


Independent Performance Matters

As adoption grows, so does the need for independently validated technology. The report specifically highlights the role of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE) in benchmarking facial age estimation technology and helping buyers compare performance across providers.

In ROC’s Age Assurance Pioneer profile, the report cites the company’s performance in NIST FATE Age Estimation & Verification, where ROC achieved a mean absolute error of 2.96 years across application, border, and mugshot datasets, ranking as the top U.S. provider as of December 2024. This independent evaluation is especially important in a market where organizations must balance accuracy with privacy, security, usability, and regulatory requirements.

See how ROC ranks #1 globally in child online safety and mugshot age estimation

Building Age Assurance Around Trust

The report makes clear that the future of age assurance is unlikely to belong to a single technology. Instead, biometric age estimation, identity verification, digital credentials, device-level signals, and reusable proofs are beginning to form a broader trust infrastructure.

“The central question is increasingly not simply whether a platform can check age, but how that age signal is established, protected, and trusted across the digital ecosystem.”


ROC is helping build that foundation with American-made biometric AI designed for high-performance identity and age assurance workflows. For organizations navigating emerging age requirements, ROC Age Estimation provides document-free facial age estimation alongside broader biometric identity, liveness, and verification technologies that can support different levels of assurance as requirements evolve.

A Market Moving Quickly

The age assurance market is still taking shape, but the direction is increasingly clear: stronger regulation, greater emphasis on privacy, more independent testing, and a shift toward interoperable trust. Being named an Age Assurance Pioneer recognizes ROC’s role in that evolution, with plenty of work still ahead as age assurance becomes a fundamental part of digital identity.

For a deeper look at what this means in practice, read our expert Q&A: How AI Age Estimation Performs in the Real World, where we break down the real-world performance, accuracy considerations, and deployment challenges to consider when putting the technology to work.

Featuring ROC Director of Machine Learning KP Patel