FaceTec brings on standards executive from the Kantara Initiative

FaceTec is bringing a new executive to its team. Andrew Hughes has been named vice president of Global Standards at the face verification software company.

Hughes is known for his work at the Kantara Initiative, the international non-profit association focused on identity standards and personal data exchange. Currently, he is the chair of the Kantara Initiative board of directors, Identity Assurance Work Group, and Deepfakes/AI Impact on ID Verification Systems group.

Over the past 25 years, he has also worked for prominent organizations such as Idemia, Ping Identity, the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), Mastercard, IEEE, ISO, W3C, the OpenID Foundation, the Decentralized Identity Foundation and the FIDO Alliance.

At FaceTec, Hughes plans to work on biometric liveness detection in anti-spoofing and presentation attack detection, according to his LinkedIn post.

“Biometric verification is the next big leap in securing digital IDs by creating strong links to their real, authorized, physical humans, and FaceTec has quickly become the global leader in 3D Liveness and face verification software,” he says in a release.

The company’s technology powers biometrics for Utah’s mobile driver licenses (mDLs) and it is working on similar partnerships.

Last month, FaceTec announced it recorded a year-over-year growth rate of 172 percent in 3D biometric liveness checks, conducting over two billion of them throughout the year. In a recent test conducted by NIST-certified provider BixieLab, the company passed presentation attack detection (PAD) tests Level 1 and 2.

The U.S.-based company noted that Hughes’s expertise in international standards and assessment frameworks for digital identity and authentication will be instrumental in the company’s compliance efforts.

“We are very fortunate to have Andrew joining the FaceTec team,” says the firm’s CEO Kevin Alan Tussy. “As biometric security becomes a critical part of our daily lives, his well-earned industry experience and deep understanding of standards and credentialing will be crucial to FaceTec’s continued success.”

Article Topics

appointments  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  FaceTec  |  identity assurance