Five face biometrics partnerships and big ambitions revealed

As the use of selfie biometrics and digital identity diffuses across more sectors and parts of life, the number of deals is accelerating. Here is a round-up of new partnerships for Mobbeel, iDenfy, Onfido, IDmission, and Signicat, Sumsub predictions and an award for Shufti Pro.

Santander bank offers facial authentication to 10 million customers in Brazil

Spanish bank Santander is expanding its offer of authentication via face biometrics to 10 million customers who use smartphone banking. The rollout will be staggered and available to individual and corporate account holders.

The system will give customers a larger transaction value limit and enables Santander ID on new cell phones. This involves face validation of the account holder to ensure that the new device is legitimate and prevents bad actors from registering accounts to different handsets.

Santander is creating its own database to store the personal information collected in enrollment.

The bank estimates the individual customer digital transaction rates – already at 92 percent of all transactions – could rise to 94 percent while for corporate customers it could reach almost 100 percent.

Different Santander subsidiaries in Latin America have partnered with FacePhi and TOC Biometrics to provide onboarding through facial authentication.

Mobbeel technology powering fully biometric journeys from Barcelona airport

More details have emerged on Europe’s first claimed fully biometric passenger journey for a flight, from Barcelona to Malaga with the low-cost carrier Vueling. While Idemia is working with airport operator Aena on infrastructure and systems for biometric passage through the airport as part of the trial, it is now known that biometrics authentication specialist Mobbeel is supplying the app for the initial biometric enrollment of passengers before they head to Barcelona-El Prat airport.

The Aena app developed by Mobbeel allows selfie sign-up and a scan of a passports with NFC or the Spanish national ID card (DNI), though this can also be done at two kiosks at the airport.

iDenfy partners with inHouse Pay to provide identity verification for financial transactions

Estonia’s first licensed e-money institution, inHouse Pay, has chosen identity verification and compliance firm iDenfy to provide checking for its payment initiation service.

As an electronic money institution, inHouse Pay is not a bank, but enables transactions of e-money. iDenfy will secure the onboarding process for clients.

iDenfy recently partnered with A.ID to provide identity verification services for higher-risk segments of the financial services market, and to tackle fraud for freelancer hiring platform JobHireHunt.

Lemonway and Onfido partner to bring identity verification to payments

In further European payments news, leading payment institution Lemonway will streamline its user onboarding and KYC with Onfido’s AI-powered identity verification platform to its payment solution for online marketplaces and crowdfunding sites in Europe.

Household names such as Renault, Decathlon and SNCF use Lemonway’s API for their B2B and B2C markets.

“As a licensed payment institution not only do we help platforms secure transactions, we constantly want to keep them ahead of the game,” says Simon Berger-Perrin, chief product officer at Lemonway.

“Our collaboration with Onfido is one of the first milestones of an upcoming visionary KYC experience made by and for marketplaces.”

‘Bank-in-a-box’ provider Neofy selects IDmission for KYC, AML

Neofy’s product is a kit to allow clients to more easily launch a challenger bank. The firm has chosen IDmission as the biometric identity provider and solution for KYC and AML, built in to the ‘bank-in-a-box’ product.

Puneet Gupta, CTO and co-founder of Neofy, comments, “AI and machine vision based innovations is at the heart of Neofy proposition for its clients. IDmission is an important piece in our solution set to automate customer onboarding and offering cutting edge security solutions to our clients in a way that exhibits the lowest level of friction.”

“Banking-as-a-Service offerings like Neofy need flexibility to be able to compose user experiences that span the lifecycle of customer Identity,” says Ashim Banerjee, CEO of IDmission.

“IDmission’s AI driven multimodal biometric platform with built-in global AML and other compliance checks offers that very kind of composable KYC.”

Signicat joins Auth0, asks why the Nordics have been so successful with digital identity

The Nordics are home to a large number of technical developers of both hardware and systems used for digital identity and biometrics, but what really sets the region apart is its uptake of digital identity in daily life for accessing services.

Norwegian digital identity firm Signicat has released its own report into why eID has taken hold so firmly in the region. “The State of digital identity in the Nordics 2021,” finds that cooperation between public authorities and the financial sector, population registries with unique national identification numbers and digitized infrastructure for accessing services whether public or private, have proved favorable conditions.

The report also finds that interoperability between the region’s eIDs is fragmented. It examines how businesses can prepare for the upcoming EU Digital Identity Framework.

Signicat has also joined the Auth0 Marketplace, which hosts third-party integrations for applications.

Auth0 customers will now be able to onboard and authenticate their users through more than 30 third-party eID integrations offered via Signicat’s Digital Identity Platform.

Sumsub releases identity fraud study, predictions

From the tens of millions of identity checks it performed in 2020-21 and tens of thousands of fraud attempts it detects each month on behalf of its clients, Sumsub has compiled a report into the current fraud situation and predictions for the future.

“Sumsub Identity Fraud Study (2021)” finds that fraudsters are becoming more skilled with 35 percent of all attempts using advanced techniques, a proportion expected to continue to rise. It also finds fraud happens at all stages of verification. The step most commonly targeted by verification fraud attempts is the ID check, at 65 percent of attempts. The driving licence check, listed separately, sees almost 12 percent of fraud attempts, proof of address sees 5.5 percent while selfies see 0.9 and liveness detection 6.7 percent of attempts.

Coming up in the future: even more, increasingly sophisticated fraud. Bad actors will continue to exploit the COVID pandemic, forgeries will improve with deepfakes for biometric checks and more forgeries of digital identity documents.

“The biggest danger is deepfakes,” writes Sumsub co-founder and CTO, Vyacheslav Zholudev. “At present, it’s difficult for an ordinary person to make a high-quality deepfake—but soon, I’m afraid, technologies will reach the point where everyone can make a realistic deepfake on their phone in 2 seconds. We must not lose our vigilance and work ahead of fraudsters. The good news is: I expect that soon many documents will have chips that allow documents to be validated. Also, I hope that governments themselves will provide ways to validate documents.”

Shufti Pro picks up award for Best KYC and Onboarding

AI-powered KYC specialist Shufti Pro has picked up the ‘Best KYC and Onboarding Solution’ award at the Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2021.

The award noted the liveness detection checks and real-time IDV capabilities, OCR for multiple document types and video KYC.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  face biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  iDenfy  |  identity verification  |  IDmission  |  KYC  |  Mobbeel  |  onboarding  |  Onfido  |  Shufti Pro  |  Signicat  |  Sumsub