UK firms do a lot of manual authentication. Is there a better practice?

Eyeballing documents for forgeries is still a surprisingly common practice given the resources at forgers’ disposal. Even moreso as digital ID systems get more sophisticated.

SmartSearch, an anti-money laundering systems vendor, is pushing research it has done on financial service, legal and property firm practices. Twenty-eight percent of United Kingdom company in these sectors say their employees are best at finding fraudulent hard copies.

The company does not say if their research indicated a success rate. It does, however, say that 28 percent of surveyed companies report not knowing of digital ID products (such as its own).

In a coincidence, a digital ID pilot in Australia succeeded in cutting more than 70 hours out of the time it takes to perform workplace credential checks. In fact, verification for a new employee fell from 72 hours to a half-hour, according to reporting by tech publisher iTnews.

The pilot was a collaboration by Australian electronic funds transfer vendor eftpos, the Queensland transport and roads department, financial tech firm Meeco and Hedera Hashgraph. Hedera is a public distributed ledger led by dozens of entities.

Safety, training and licensing documentation held by the transport department were verified in the pilot.

Meeco’s wallet app stored the credentials. Eftpos’ digital ID technology, ConnectID, acted as a broker, according to iTnews.

The pilot occurred on the site of Powertech, an engineering and technical-services company, where the time spent by applicants gathering documents was cut from 48 hours to 30 minutes.

Assuming software can spot as many fraudulent documents as humans, the pilot’s results indicate that companies can at least know sooner that something is amiss and move on to other tasks, presumably involving legitimate documents

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometrics  |  credentials  |  digital ID  |  document verification  |  Eftpos  |  fraud prevention  |  identity document  |  SmartSearch