OCR Studio joins AVPA as age verification market expands from EU to UAE

OCR Studio is the newest member of the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA), joining the global trade body for privacy-preserving, standards-based age assurance technology providers to expand its participation in policy side of age-restriction enforcement.

Online platforms are implementing age checks in response to new and stricter online safety rules lawmakers and regulators around the world are putting in place. While the UK Online Safety Act, EU Digital Services Act and state-level age check laws in the U.S. have gotten most of the attention, other jurisdictions like the UAE are also taking action to require age assurance.

The AVPA represents businesses that provide the technology to carry out those checks, whether in the form of age verification with ID documents and selfie biometrics, facial age estimation or another method. Most of the major age assurance technology providers around the world are members of the AVPA.

OCR Studio’s client-side age verification runs in the user’s browser, capturing ID documents with the device camera and offering an option to match selfie biometrics to prevent fraud with borrowed documents. Sensitive identity data remains on the user’s device, helping businesses reduce their data protection obligations while supporting compliance with both data privacy and online safety requirements.

“Age assurance is becoming one of the key trust layers of the modern Internet, and regulators are increasingly clear that confirming age should not require exposing full identity data,” says OCR Studio CTO Konstantin Bulatov, Ph.D. “AVPA plays a key role in shaping this approach by promoting standards-based, privacy-preserving age assurance that focuses on verifying eligibility rather than identity. As more jurisdictions adopt stricter requirements, the industry needs solutions that can deliver reliable age decisions while minimizing data collection and reducing risks for both platforms and users.”

OCR Studio also recently enhanced its ID document scanning capability to detect a wider range of AI manipulations, after launching a pair of toolsets specifically for in-browser age verification and KYC checks last year.

The company was just at GITEX AI Europe in Berlin demonstrating both its KYC and customer onboarding technologies and how its age assurance solution supports compliance with rules already in place in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland, in addition to the UK.

Article Topics

age verification  |  AVPA  |  OCR Labs  |  UAE