Thales and Thirdstream partner to fight fraud at Canadian banks with in-person IDV

Canada-based fintech onboarding provider Thirdstream has partnered with Thales to provide ID verification at bank branches to thwart in-person identity theft.

Thirdstream will supply ID document scanner devices from Thales to Canadian financial institutions to enable them to read and check the authenticity of government-issued travel and identity documents. Thirdstream notes in an announcement that Thales’ scanners have been proven in deployments at international borders and other applications.

The scanners are being integrated with Thirdstream’s configurable onboarding platform to provide a seamless customer experience and ensure regulatory compliance.

Fraud attempts have spiked in the financial services sector, according to the announcement, raising the need for protection against both in-person and remote attacks.

The two companies are already partners: Thirdstream has been using Thales’ IdCloud platform to provide remote KYC and AML checks through ID document, selfie biometrics checks and liveness detection since 2020.

“The expansion of our partnership reflects on both companies’ commitment to remain at the forefront of innovation for the financial services industry,” says Keith Ginter, Thirdstream’s CEO. “This advancement elevates the standards for identity verification in Canada. We are creating what some refer to as a ‘friction-right’ experience for consumers, which, research shows, is the single greatest contributor to defeating identity theft.”

Video IDV for legal profession

The rules for identity verification via video conferencing by lawyers and paralegals in the Canadian province of Ontario have been updated, effective January 1, 2024.

Legal professionals are now required to authenticate the government-issued photo ID of people on video conferences, rather than simply view both the person and their ID during the call.

There are three options available to legal professionals to carry out authentication. They can accept ID scans through the client’s mobile phone or computer, obtain consistent biographic information from two sources defined by the Law Society of Ontario as reliable, or perform a credit file check, if the credit file has three years of history.

If they chose the ID-scanning method, lawyers and paralegals must also apply technology to confirm the authenticity of the document.  The Law Society of Ontario provides a list of services that can be used, provided by 1Kosmos, Applied Recognition, AuthenticID, bluink, Folio Technologies, Treefort, Trulioo and Vaultie Digital Trust Solutions.  The list is non-exhaustive however, and a link is also provided to a directory compiled by the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), which includes FaceTec, iProov, Jumio, Regula and Thales, among others.

Article Topics

Canada  |  document verification  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  onboarding  |  Thales Digital Identity and Security