Biometric digital onboarding technology now ready for all challenges, Innovatrics says

When Innovatrics turned its multimodal biometrics expertise to digital onboarding, the idea was still novel. The possibility of a seamless, comfortable and secure way to onboard clients without any physical paperwork, and without them visiting a branch or store, had been envisioned, but the technology was simply not good enough.

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology, at the time, was not capable of handling poorly lit photos of ID cards or other credentials, so Innovatrics developed its own OCR feature based on neural networks, Daniel Ferak, head of product management at Innovatrics told Biometric Update in an email interview.

More recently, Innovatrics devised its own liveness check to provide a more comfortable experience for the user. The latest iteration of Innovatrics’ liveness detection technology is fully passive, able to judge liveness based on a single frame. The liveness feature also works on-device, making it more practical for areas without strong internet connectivity.

“The first results from the real-world application show that 99 percent of clients finish the onboarding process with passive liveness while the completion rate with the previous approach, that demanded more interaction with the user, was below 70 percent and took 13 seconds to complete,” Ferak says. “The on-device passive liveness check is instant.”

This latter capability could potentially open up onboarding for a whole range of markets traditionally underserved by some of the various industries that can use facial recognition with biometric liveness checks to meet stringent regulatory requirements.

In many markets with strong internet connectivity, remote onboarding was already increasing in popularity before the onset of COVID-19 forced millions of people, many of whom are older individuals previously considered resistant to engaging through digital channels, to sign up for digital services. In many sectors, remote onboarding is now a table stakes requirement for continuing operations.

Fortunately, the technology has evolved to the point where it is both highly reliable and widely accepted. People have generally been convinced of the value of the native biometrics on their smartphones already, and can easily understand their value in authentication processes.

The simple process of taking a selfie and a photo of an ID and letting the back-end do the rest is easily adapted to know your customer (KYC) and other regulatory requirements. The biometric comparison of the two images is just one of the security layers involved. An algorithm which has passed a compliance assessment for the relevant ISO standard by a third part like iBeta Quality Assurance confirms that the person passing the first biometric check is present, rather than reproduced with a mask, photo or video,  and the OCR technology also extracts and prefills all data from the ID, which makes the process easier for the customer while eliminating a possible point of fraud, when set to prevent the data from being rewritten.

In the background, algorithms estimate the age and gender of the user and compare them to the ID data to flag potential inconsistencies, which helps to detect doctored identity documents and ID cards. The detailed onboarding data is also fed into a risk management system, in some cases provided by a bank, in others by a biometric system provider, which allow for further tweaks to the system.

In addition to reduced fraud rates and faster onboarding processes with higher customer satisfaction, banks and other financial institutions usually find a significant decrease in abandonment rates, Innovatrics Director of Global Sales Peter Martis says.

Once used mainly for financial services, remote digital onboarding is also now widely used in the telecom sector for SIM registration.

“We have a customer from the shared economy that uses it to double-check the identities of drivers in taxis so they cannot employ others, such as illegal immigrants instead of themselves,” explains Martis. “It is also used when selling tickets to high-demand events to prevent ticket scalping.”

Innovatrics will host a webinar on Thursday, October 29 at 1:00pm on ‘Digital Onboarding: From Vision to Value,” featuring Acuity Market Research Principal Analyst Maxine Most.

With lockdowns and quarantines continuing, demand for remote onboarding capabilities is surging all over the world. Innovatrics believes its blend of biometrics, liveness and OCR technology has evolved to the point where any organization can make digital onboarding secure and easy for customers.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  Innovatrics  |  KYC  |  OCR  |  onboarding  |  passive facial liveness  |  remote authentication