Selfie biometrics extended by Veriff, GetID, VaultID as Facebook intros video face and motion detection

Based on feedback from the end-users of its customers, Veriff has expanded its language support to make its customer verification process available in 34 languages, which the company says is well ahead of its competition.

The new languages are available in Veriff’s Android and iOS SDKs, as well as its web verification flows.

“Veriff is a trendsetter and we want the verification to be available in as many languages as possible to serve our customers’ needs and align with their products,” comments Veriff CMO Triin Uustalu. “Having the opportunity to verify yourself in your mother tongue, dramatically improves the conversion rate for our customers.”

After originally launching in English, Veriff quickly added Estonian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, and Latvian. The company responded to customer demand by launching Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Arabic and Japanese. The Italian, French, Dutch, Lithuanian, Czech, Ukrainian, Hindi, Malay, Georgian, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Mexican Spanish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Slovak, Macedonian, Croatian, Norwegian, Finnish, and Swedish languages are now also available.

The company also recently added NFC functionality for ePassport reading.

GetID and idCredit

Veriff’s fellow Estonian startup GetID has partnered with idCredit to bring biometric ID verification and simplified know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks to businesses.

GetID provides selfie and ID document checks, while idCredit provides a distributed blockchain system to identify physical and legal entities for KYC and electronic signature applications. GetID says it reduces the amount of time necessary to authenticate clients, and offers flexible pricing and payment conditions. The biometric offering is the first software product available on idCredit’s platform. Users verify their identities with just one click using the idCredit app, rather than uploading documents to a third party each time a KYC check is performed.

VaultID

Timor-Leste money transfer service Island Dream Money has integrated biometric selfie and ID document check technology from VaultID to create a digital ID and financial footprint for unbanked people, who make up about a third of the island’s population.

The myVault wallet application enables Dream Island Money to onboard potential clients with a mix of traditional KYC and AML systems, biometric facial comparison to a scanned ID document, and witness attestation by a government official.

Island Dream Money holds an exclusive license with MoneyGram to provide remittances in Timor-Leste. Remittances are the third-largest source of foreign revenue on Timor-Leste, following the oil industry and aid, with more than 85,000 individual payments bringing in a combined $40 million in 2017, according to the announcement.

“Through ‘myVault’, we have extended traditional KYC to a new eKYC offering which includes Self-Sovereign Identity; the consumer has control, sole ownership and management of their digital identity as well as how their data is stored, shared or used for verification,” says VaultID Group CEO Jason Edwards. “To this end, we have added Witness attestation verification options by government approved local administrative staff. With accurate consumer details, official attestation, biometric matching and traditional documentation, myVault is a new paradigm in APAC consumer onboarding for financial service providers.”

Facebook verifies accounts

In an apparent bid to combat fake accounts, Facebook has launched a video verification system, asking users to record video clips looking in different directions to prove that they are in fact a real person, Mashable reports.

The feature in testing was spotted by prominent Facebook researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who speculates that the system uses facial recognition, though the report says it is not clear that the feature is identifying faces. A message accompanying the prompt from the social media platform says the videos will not be seen by anyone else, and will be deleted after 30 days.

Reached for comment by Mashable, a Facebook representative denied that biometrics are used to identify the individual.

“This test is one of the steps we use to determine that a real person is operating an account rather than a bot,” the spokesperson confirms. “It does not use facial recognition. Instead, it detects motion and whether a face is in the video.”

Mashable notes that not all features tested by the company are adopted across the platform.

Facebook is bound up in a court case over its use of facial recognition on Illinois residents, but has also developed an algorithm to prevent facial recognition from being used on videos.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  face detection  |  face photo  |  Facebook  |  facial recognition  |  GetID  |  identity verification  |  selfie biometrics  |  VaultID  |  Veriff  |  video