Identity for finance: verification sector to reach $9.1B by 2024, new tech and hires

While economic pressures may be impacting the financial sector, the identify verifiers, KYC and AML providers serving it are forecast to continue their strong growth. Firms are becoming increasingly global in outlook, staffing and capabilities such as languages.

Digital identity verification for regtech to reach $9.1B by 2024

Digital tools for KYC and AML are the “next big thing in regtech” according to the GP Bullhound Sector Report for Q2 2022. While areas such as crypto and fintech struggle, especially among larger operators, digital identity-based solutions are seen as vital tools to bring advanced authentication without sacrificing customer onboarding.

Increasing regulation worldwide is also leading to more demand for digital identity for verification, leading to an expanding market. The identity verification solutions market for regtech is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 15.2 percent taking 2019’s US$4.5 billion to $9.1 billion by 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated the move towards digital identity verification notes the report, along with new payment methods.

IDnow focuses on UK financial services sector with new hire

Video identification and signature specialist IDnow is increasing its focus on the UK with the hire of Mike Kiely as Sales Director for Financial Services, based in Manchester.

Kiely brings decades of experience in data and biometrics and joins from GBG and is seen as instrumental in the firm becoming a leader in the UK and then global financial sectors.

“As a German business, IDnow has built a platform that meets some of the world’s strictest compliance and regulation requirements, while offering the broadest portfolio of identity proofing methods,” comments Kiely.

“As such, it is in an incredibly unique position, able to support businesses in their identity proofing needs who are looking to scale beyond their UK territory, and into geographies that are inherently difficult to penetrate such as France and Germany.”

IDnow recently appointed Jean-Marc Guyot as VP of R&D with the responsibility of uniting the IDnow and Ariadnext engineering teams after the acquisition last year. The firm’s order intake leapt by 95 percent across the unified digital identity platform in Q1 2022.

Ondato adds automated risk scoring to customer onboarding

Ondato is introducing Ondato Risk Scoring to address the risk of non-compliance in onboarding to high human error rates. The automated tool lets companies identify customer risks and tackle both overly high acceptance or rejection error rates associated with manual AML assessment.

Each customer is given a risk score and financial institutions will gain a clearer understanding of their AML risk exposure across their entire customer portfolio.

“Part of the challenge preventing better AML compliance is that the majority of current risk assessment and risk management tools are still based on spreadsheets, such as Excel, or static reporting platforms,” comments Liudas Kanapienis, CEO and co-founder of Ondato.

“As a result, they do not allow data to be analysed in one place and at a scale large enough to cope with the demands of growing companies or established institutions. Ondato Risk Scoring eliminates the need for spreadsheets, automates the risk assessment process, and generates a more fine-grained picture of risks.”

iDenfy adds Face Authentication to authenticate existing customers, eliminate takeover

Lithuania’s iDenfy has added new face biometrics to its toolkit to ensure security is not eroded for the sake of speed in identity verification.

Face Authenticate is a three-step process. First, standard identity verification using the face. Then head movements. After receiving the result of that, there is a continuity check to ensure the customer is the same person as the one who originally completed identity verification.

The firm recently launched its Business Verification platform.

Veriff can now read the Arabic alphabet

Digital identity verification provider Veriff has added Arabic alphabet recognition to be able to verify documents using the alphabet, initially Arabic-language documents including the Egyptian ID, Saudi ID and Saudi residence permit.

Holders of documents where details such as names were included only in the Arabic alphabet or script may face difficulties using automated identity verification systems, including Veriff’s before the update.

The platform can now verify documents in 45 languages, using multiple scripts. The new languages include Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, Sinhala and Thai. Veriff believes this means its service beats the competition in terms of language coverage.

Article Topics

AML  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  document verification  |  face biometrics  |  financial services  |  iDenfy  |  identity verification  |  IDnow  |  KYC  |  Ondato  |  Veriff