The benefits that come with remote biometric verification for pensioners

With the digital transformation train travelling at supersonic speed, every sector wants to get onboard. This is reflected in the manner in which services across the board are increasingly being digitized for various reasons including convenience and security.

This is even more crucial for a sector like pensions which involves dealing with people often beyond the middle age group limit. Among the issues they face are problems linked to identity verification. In some regions, pension earners are constrained to complete proof of identity processes in person, creating significant inconveniences for them given their advance ages, coupled sometimes with sickness and other infirmities.

In a bid to smoothen the verification process, several countries have put or are in the process of putting in place systems which can manage remote biometric identity verification for pensioners – a process which experts say comes with a catalogue of benefits both for the user and the service provider.

Some of these verification systems are mobile verification applications and biometric verification hand-held devices, such as the case in Namibia where the Government Institutions Pensions Fund (GIPF) has just launched these services in one Region of the country.

The GIPF says the novelty underlines its commitment to “positively transforming its operations and strategic objective of being a member-centric pensions fund.” It notes that the move is a response to calls asking it to improve its biometric verification process by integrating new technologies, and making access to services more seamless.

In India, there is the Jeevan Pramaan biometric service which was introduced in 2014 in the wake of complaints about the difficulties faced by pensioners having to be physically present in front of a disbursing agency or certification authority to obtain life certificates which are a requirement for pension payment.

Prior to the digitization of the process of getting a life certificate which uses the Aadhaar platform for biometric authentication, people went through so much “hardship and unnecessary inconvenience” to get themselves the credential. That stress now appears to be a thing of the past as pension earners now get to obtain their life certificates online, provided they have their Aadhaar digital ID.

Similar systems to enable ID verification for pensioners in digital mode also exists in other countries such as Pakistan where a Biometric Verification Service was launched in March to facilitate the verification of pensioners using NADRA, an online life certificate system for beneficiaries deployed by the military pensions board of Nigeria, the oversees pensioner verification system in the UK using mypensionID as part of a plan to curb benefits fraud, and the mandatory life checks for pensioners in Togo between the months of May and June 2024, still as a fraud prevention measure.

These are all solutions and systems deployed not only to streamline access to pension services for users, but also to enhance security, combat fraud and other irregularities common with pension management, reduce administrative costs, make available a multichannel support mechanism to address users’ concerns, enhance regulatory compliance, and enable the keeping of accurate data and records, among other benefits.

In the same light, digital ID verification provider Socure, in a report, posits that “robust and equitable identity verification” is an indispensable solution to the spiralling fraud levels associated with pension funds. The report discusses the extent of pension fraud and how the company’s software can help governments and organizations address fraud vulnerabilities. Socure, last month, announced the expansion of its ID verification service now available in more than 190 countries.

One is clear that for the Global South, the increasing digitization of government services, improvement in smartphone penetration and the implementation of national digital ID programs are all factors favorable for the deployment of remote biometric pension verification systems.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  government services  |  identity verification  |  remote verification  |  selfie biometrics