Nomidio providing remote biometric identity verification for UK business loans from Hitachi capital

Nomidio has been selected by Hitachi Capital to provide remote identity verification with selfie biometrics, a liveness check, and identity document verification (IDV) for getting financial support to UK businesses quickly, easily and remotely.

Hitachi Capital is one of the nation’s leading business finance providers, and a key partner in the UK Government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), according to the announcement. Experienced personnel from Hitachi Capital’s business finance division have traditionally performed the legal identity verification part of the application process in person, and the company needed a new process to replace it. In the four weeks since Hitachi Capital began using Nomidio for remote identity verification, use of the service has increased four-fold.

The process was designed to support Hitachi Capital’s direct channel, but under current circumstances the remote ID checks have been rolled out for its indirect business, which it says is much larger, arranging loans via brokers and others.

“Fortunately we were looking at remote identity verification across the business before coronavirus hit the UK for our direct channel since November 2019,” explains Hitachi Capital Business Finance Head of Marketing Jo Morris. “When it became clear we would need to support UK businesses incredibly quickly, at scale, as a partner in the CBILS we knew we needed a digital way to validate applicant identity for the vast majority of our business, which is handled in-directly via partners.”

Morris also says that if the company had not already been working with Nomidio, it would have been left scrambling, rather than replacing its face-to-face process with one at least as convenient and secure, or more so. She expects groups from all Hitachi Capital’s business areas to continue using Nomidio after physical distancing measures have abated, and also lauds the completion of the process through its own website, rather than forcing customers to download a new app.

The service was turned on for the broker channel within 24 hours, the companies say, which was possible due to Nomidio’s delivery as a service.

“For UK providers grappling with the shift to remote services I’d say keep it simple,” Nomidio Commerial Director Philip Black advises. “Don’t try and undertake a large IT project now, you need to be nimble, look for cloud solutions that don’t need integration work. We’ve actually worked with Hitachi Capital for 18 months as we designed, tested and iterated the Nomidio identity service, so we know it’s robust, we know it meets security, privacy and compliance requirements. Hopefully others can benefit from this heavy-lifting now it’s packaged as a cloud-service you can spin-up in hours.”

Nomidio launched its PII Cloud to enable organizations to transition towards self-sovereign identity (SSI) models, and Head of Worldwide Sales Ben Todd explained the key-splitting technology behind the service to Biometric Update.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  financial services  |  identity document  |  identity verification  |  Nomidio  |  UK