What is Failure to Acquire Rate (FTA)?

Failure to Acquire (FTA) is the percentage of attempts where the system is unable to obtain any usable biometric data to work with—no face detected, glare overwhelms the image, camera is obstructed, network timeout. It is not a model miss; it is a pipeline miss.

Why it matters: high FTA obliterates conversion rates and masks true model accuracy. Address capture flow first (prompt clarity, auto retakes, device and network resilience) before tuning thresholds. Monitor FTA by device class, browser, and geo to identify brittle edge cases. A majority of “accuracy” complaints are actually acquisition failures.

Operational tip: use FTA as a gating metric for changes/releases. If an innocuous UI change causes FTA to increase significantly, rollback. Augment capture success with liveness as appropriate and maintain high enrollment quality via rigorous identity verification—good reference data minimizes downstream friction.

Acquire cleanly, decide cleanly. Everything else is noise.