Plaid face and behavioral biometrics support instant authenticated online payments

Plaid and Astra, which provides infrastructure for fast payments, have extended their partnership to offer a unified software package to embed secure instant transfers into fintech products, according to a company announcement.

The integration gives developers access to Plaid’s Identity Verification product, which includes an anti-fraud engine with checks against authoritative data sources, ID document authentication, selfie biometrics and liveness detection, and risk assessment. The software provides behavioral biometrics, device, network and synthetic identity risk signals.

The biometric software verifies identities in as little as ten seconds and consistently hits pass rates of 90 percent or higher, according to its product page.

Astra says its APIs make 99.9964 percent of transfers successful and secure, and slashes loss rates for returns and chargebacks to less than $37 for every $1 million processed. It also simplifies processes for debit transfers to ease payment lifecycle management for businesses with its PCI-compliant platform.

“All consumer experiences are trending towards faster, on-demand funds availability across deposits and withdrawals, but faster settlement comes with increased risk. By combining the powerful technology of Plaid Identity Verification with Astra’s flexible APIs for real-time payments, developers can now easily make that user experience a reality with built-in, best-in-class security,” said Gil Akos, Astra CEO.

“By pairing Plaid Identify Verification with the payments technology offered by Astra, our joint customers will be able to onboard users and spin up real-time transfers in the same session,” said Tamara Romanek, head of partnerships at Plaid.

The partners emphasize the advantage to developers of not having to build the entire software stack to process payments, which can accelerate their time to market.

Plaid launched one-click identity verification to any service it supports for end-users who have previously completed identity verification on the Plaid platform in June.

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  identity verification  |  payments  |  Plaid