The many benefits of contactless biometric acquisition and authentication technologies in COVID-19 era

This is a guest post by Okhiaofe Ivharue, head of digital and marketing communications at Seamfix.

Never was there a time when contactless technology was more important than now with the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world. Noting that the chief method of transmission of the virus is through contact with infected persons and surfaces, people are obligated to keep a measured distance from other people — a behavior termed ‘social distancing’ — and are even less keen to have anything to do with surfaces.

This new way of life has its many effects on industries and sectors all around the world, and most are negative. Businesses will need to restructure their activities and choice of technology to accommodate this new shift in behavior and quickly find a way to combat safety concerns or struggle to survive during and post COVID-19 era.

This change is even more for businesses that acquire biometric data of their customers as a means of proof before availing them with certain services. These businesses must think beyond biometric data acquisition and authentication that requires physical contact with people or surfaces — Hence, way beyond fingerprint recognition which is the most common means of identity verification right now.

Even though one might argue that disinfecting the fingerprint recognition sensors may or may not get rid of the virus completely, one should also ask “how about the customers that are reluctant or skeptical about putting their fingers on a surface they deem virus-ridden no matter how many times it is wiped down? Are business owners or agents to turn them back? What then does that do to customer acquisition or the bottom line of the business?”

Thinking way beyond fingerprint will leave us with facial and iris recognition.

Biometric technologies that provide facial and iris capture and verification services come into play to enable secure, touch-free data acquisition (digital identities) from the medically-advised distance and authentication to reduce the risk of impersonation or fraud. These technologies will serve to flatten the curve by preventing further infections and encourage business continuity.

The Many Benefits in Diverse Sectors

If the world were ever to be so ‘open’ again, businesses and even the government must jump aboard the idea of contactless biometric acquisition and authentication technology. Its usefulness spreads across multiple sectors and industries.

For one, in the aviation sector, adopting a contactless facial and iris recognition system to authenticate digital identities of passengers, instead of having them place their hands on a scanner as they pass through the gates, will ensure the safety of aviation workers and passengers. These technologies could even go further for contactless visa onboarding and authentication at borders or immigration centers.

Telecommunications companies will need contactless biometric acquisition and authentication technologies to enable their agents to collect and validate biometric data of new subscribers during SIM registration processes or authenticate biometric data of current subscribers before providing them with certain services, all done while maintaining necessary distance.

Security companies can arm their guards with one of such technologies on a mobile device to serve as a digital logbook used to document people who enter or exit an estate or building.

The usefulness of these technologies goes far and beyond — from banks utilizing them to safely acquire customers in the field to schools authenticating students before they enter into exam halls to healthcare admin workers enrolling patients from a distance to government agencies enumerating staff in a secure way… the list goes on and on.

These technologies besides protecting against COVID-19 will hasten customer onboarding processes and improve turnaround times.

Enabling Features and Add-on Services

Viable contactless biometric acquisition and authentication technologies must take into consideration;

• KYC compliance standards by various regulatory bodies
• Failsafe verification and validation
• Customer onboarding time
• Data security
• Ease of use and service.

ID Match

The inclusion of this feature will rule out impersonation as the faces of end-users can be compared with images on verified proofs of identity, like a driver’s license, in real-time, to ascertain that the faces and the images match.

Liveness Detection

With this feature in place, it becomes easy to prove the viability of every captured image and offer 100 percent assurance that every image is that of a living, animated person as opposed to a picture on picture capture.

Background Cleanup

In a bid to adhere to strict KYC regulations on captured images, this feature will prove necessary to ensure that all images captured conform to stipulated background-uniformity requirements. It also allows for the flexibility to capture images anywhere and still have them end up with a noiseless background.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

This feature goes beyond offering ease and speed of capture to end-users, to acting as a necessary requirement for this COVID-19 era where touchless is the order of the day as textual data can be extracted from physical forms and automatically populate corresponding digital fields.

Deduplication

Having duplicate data can taint the result and analysis of collated data, hence the need to ensure that each captured data is unique and has no duplicate. This enabling feature comes in handy to scan through databases and fish out duplicate data within configured capture rules.

About the author

Okhiaofe Ivharue is responsible for digital and marketing communications at Seamfix.

DISCLAIMER: Biometric Update’s Industry Insights are submitted content. The views expressed in this post are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of Biometric Update.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  biometric enrollment  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  collection  |  contactless biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  iris recognition  |  Seamfix