Aadhaar user verification integrations for Indian social media, Cashfree Payments

Users of India’s Twitter-like platform Koo can now voluntarily verify themselves via their Aadhaar number and fellow Bengaluru-based firm Cashfree Payments has launched a suite of Aadhaar digital identity verification tools for payments, banking and other uses.

Koo hopes for increased credibility with biometric verification

In an interview with TechCrunch, Koo’s Co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna explained that digital ID verification should improve the quality discourse and tackle bots, hate speech and trolling on the platform with more than 30 million users.

The voluntary Aadhaar verification should take just 30 seconds via a third party and will give users a green tick on their profiles. There is the possibility that in future the verification may lead to a preferential weighting for koos (equivalent to tweets) and advertisers may be able to target these users.

Radhakrishna said Koo will not store users IDs and claims that this is a world first for a platform allowing every user to verify him or herself. The firm also plans to publish its algorithms in another move to build trust with a user base.

Koo positions itself as a social media platform for non-English speaking users and already operates in 10 of India’s 22 official languages. It also moved into Nigeria when the country suspended Twitter. It aims to have 100 million users by the end of 2022, reports the BBC.

Cashfree Payments adds Aadhaar verification, automated KYC

With more than 100,000 merchants and US$20 billion a year in transactions and 50 percent market share among payment processors, Cashfree Payments is adding digital identity verification through Aadhaar integration to its suite of APIs.

The verification link to the digital identity database joins Cashfree’s authentication services for bank accounts and other Indian banking processes such as UPI, IFSC and PAN. The real-time direct API link to Aadhaar replaces OTP Aadhaar verification and should speed up KYC processes.

Merchants will get more than just an identity match. The system will give them the user’s gender, age range, Indian state and the last three digits of their mobile number registered with Aadhaar.

Cashfree’s KYC can be used across a wide range of sectors such as insurance, ecommerce (onboarding vendors, delivery personnel), ticketing, recruitment and trading platforms. Its products integrate with Paypal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Paytm and it operates in eight other countries including the U.S., Canada and the UAE.

Akash Sinha, CEO and co-founder, Cashfree Payments comments, “Integration of Aadhaar verification will immensely benefit all the businesses which require a real-time process for their user verification needs.”

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  authentication  |  biometrics  |  Cashfree Payments  |  digital identity  |  financial services  |  identity verification  |  India  |  KYC  |  national ID  |  social media