Free palm and face biometrics, digital signing offered to support pandemic relief and work from home

The biometrics industry continues to step up to help communities in need during the coronavirus outbreak, offering free services to essential businesses, remote workforces, and government benefit claims.

Redrock Biometrics is waiving the license fee for its PalmID biometric authentication and identification for businesses deemed essential during the pandemic for a year or longer.

PalmID captures palm print or veins with a standard RGB or infrared camera to create a highly unique biometric palm signature, according to the announcement, and matching an individual among tens of thousands enrolled in its database in a fraction of a second.

Redrock Co-founder Lenny Kontsevich says the company want to play a part in helping its community fight the spread of COVID-19.

“COVID-19 quarantine made us acutely aware that touching devices represents a threat to our lives. People become touch-phobic and their faces are covered by masks, which creates a need for a touchless palm solution. With PalmID, simply hold your hand in front of a reader,” says Kontsevich.

Daon offers free access control for home workforce

Daon is offering free access to its IdentityX platform for multi-factor biometrics-based authentication to all new customers to provide secure cloud-based access control through contactless technology for remote workforces.

VPNs are a popular method of enabling access to corporate systems, but most are currently secured with knowledge-based authentication methods like passwords or secret questions, or hard tokens, according to the company. This creates security and user experience problems in the former case, and the latter breaks down with lost or stolen tokens. IdentityX also comes with what Daon describes as “easy snap-in integration” to VPNs.

PrivyID to support digital signing for remote workers

PrivyID is offering a month of free digital signature service to support work-from-home practices through its new “Tanda Tangan #dirumahaja” program, which translates as “sign documents from home.”

Enterprise accounts can be used by up to 10 employees, with no limits on internally shared signed documents, and up to 100 electronic signatures for external documents. The program is available for both new and existing PrivyID customers.

PrivyID CEO Marshall Pribadi says the company has benefited from the help of state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries, and intends to help the country and its economy as much as possible.

The company announced this week that it has joined the FIDO Alliance, and says it is the first Indonesian company to do so.

Nomidio to offers free identity verification for UK Universal Credit claims

Nomidio is offering its identity verification service to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) free of charge to enable a simple three-step process through a smartphone to help first-time users prove their identity.

DWP has received more than half a million applications over the past two weeks for Universal Credit, according to the announcement, creating a backlog of people unable to start a claim. Nomidio IDV provides identity verification through ID document verification, liveness check, and biometric face match with a cloud-based service accessed through a smartphone. All personally identifiable information and biometric data are encrypted, and Nomidio says its parent company Post-Quantum has a reputation for expertise in public-key cryptography. The service performs biometric checks at the server level, rather than on the device, which the company points out is preferred by the GCHQ and the NCSC.

Nomidio says client Hitachi Capital has experienced a five-fold surge in digital loan applications through its identity service.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Daon  |  digital identity  |  electronic-signature  |  facial recognition  |  identity verification  |  multifactor authentication  |  Nomidio  |  palm biometrics  |  palm vein  |  PrivyID  |  Redrock Biometrics