Biometrics for compliant remote onboarding in high demand; Spanish regulator displeased

Alan Goode and an ID R&D executive recently discussed how companies can keep friction in their remote customer interactions low by designing biometrics into their systems properly, just as new services with selfie biometrics were launched by Digidentity and a partnership formed by TrustQuay with GBG. AU10TIX has picked up a customer win in the space, and all this demand has prompted AuthenticID to develop high-speed identity proofing.

Not everyone is convinced this is a good idea, however.

The Spanish data protection authority, AEPD, has ruled that biometric facial authentication should not be used to meet regulatory compliance obligations for remote client registration, Data Guidance writes.

The decision states that the country’s ‘Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing’ or ‘AML/CFT Law’ specifies identification methods allowed, and does not include biometrics. Further, using selfie biometrics to satisfy the requirements would violate GDPR’s data minimization, necessity, and proportionality principles.

Use biometrics effectively to keep friction low, Goode advises

Dramatic increases in fraud attacks around the world during the pandemic forced many companies to adopt complicated onboarding and authentication methods that resulted in lost customers and sales, Goode Intelligence CEO and Chief Analyst Alan Goode writes in a post for ID R&D.

Stats from McKinsey indicate ten years worth of ecommerce growth in the first half of 2020 in the U.S., and a survey carried out by Goode and ID R&D earlier this year shows growing acceptance of biometrics in the UK, providing a possible remedy to rising fraud rates on both sides of the Atlantic, Goode suggests.

His first piece of advice is for businesses to make sure the biometric onboarding solution they adopt meets both their customer convenience and security needs. His second suggestion is for organizations to use the biometrics collected during onboarding to create verified identity credentials.

ID R&D CEO Alexey Khitrov agrees, saying “you can take advantage of the onboarding process by collecting the face biometric data or supporting enrolment of other biometric modalities such as voice, using a product like our IDVoice, to collect biometric data – with the user’s permission and in accordance with relevant data protection regulation such as GDPR. This adds less than 20 seconds to the process and you now have a second biometric modality for use in delivering highly secure and frictionless authentication.”

Digidentity launches biometric remote onboarding service

Solera Holdings subsidiary Digidentity has launched its Remote Identification service to provide onboarding to eIDAS Substantial and High assurance levels through Near Field Communication (NFC) scanning of ID documents, selfie biometrics and liveness detection.

The company says customers worldwide can now be registered to use Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) much faster and more easily than with legacy in-person processes.

“Remote Identification enables companies to identify both employees and customers efficiently. It can also arrange legal matters with great ease of use,” explains Digidentity CTO Marcel Wendt. “This includes employment contracts, business services and onboarding processes. Following the impact of COVID-19, there has never been a greater need for this development.”

Digidentity signed up to use BioID’s biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) technology in its Gov.uk Verify service a year ago.

GBG partners on solution for corporate service providers

GBG has partnered with TrustQuay to develop a selfie biometrics-based solution for trust and corporate service providers, allowing them to offer automated remote customer onboarding.

The new upgrade to TrustQuay Portal also provides a full audit trail to support firms’ know your customer (KYC) and anti money-laundering (AML) compliance efforts, and include ID scans with validation checks against government databases. The portal also offers two-way messaging and document-sharing between corporate services and trust administrators and their clients.

“With most industries already having an intuitive two-way digital interactive user experience with clients, the trust and corporate services sector now needs to catch up with other parts of the financial services market, but quickly with reasonable levels of investment,” says TrustQuay Executive Chairman Keith Hale.

“This new version of the TrustQuay Portal enables service providers to offer an end-client digital onboarding experience, without the need for long complex integration projects of generic third-party tools, since it plugs straight into our core products. Leveraging the best in class digital onboarding capabilities of GBG, this is another significant step forward in automating and digitalising the industry.”

AU10TIX win for bank customer for biometric onboarding

CIBC FirstCaribbean is implementing identity document verification, liveness detection and face biometrics from AU10TIX to enable frictionless identity verification in seconds both for customer onboarding and account logins, according to a company announcement.

AU10TIX’ biometric authentication will be added to the bank’s ‘Apply Online’ service, first in St. Lucia in July, and then to all 16 Caribbean countries it does business on later in the summer.

“Cybercrime has been pervasive due to the pandemic and many of our habits have changed around how we, as consumers, want to connect with businesses,” comments Carey O’Connor Kolaja, CEO, AU10TIX. “Together with CIBC FirstCaribbean, we are creating a platform that responds to these digital trends with faster onboarding, tougher security and data protection, and best-in-class user experience. We are thrilled to partner with CIBC FirstCaribbean to strengthen its identity verification tools and support its journey to becoming the premier digital bank of the Caribbean.”

AuthenticID claims capability to process 35M identity proofs in a day

AuthenticID says its Identity Proofing cloud service is capable of processing nearly 35 million fully automated transactions in a day, which it says was necessitated by the burst capacity requirements of its customers.

The company says the previous high number for mobile processing of government-issued identity documents was 1 million per day, from another vendor.

This post was updated at 9:47am Eastern on July 7, 2021 to remove an erroneous reference to IDnow as involved in Digidentity’s new service.

Article Topics

AEPD  |  AU10TIX  |  AuthenticID  |  biometrics  |  Digidentity  |  financial services  |  GBG  |  Goode Intelligence  |  ID R&D  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  onboarding  |  remote authentication