OCR Studio, Wemik partner to secure AI-powered KYC workflows

Dubai-based identity verification firm OCR Studio and AI security developer Wemik have entered into what they describe as a strategic partnership to support personal data protection efforts by banks, other financial institutions, and public sector entities operating within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) market.

The partners say their collaboration seeks to address data protection challenges and help customers control personal data within their own environment at two critical levels, namely during ID scanning for Know Your Customer (KYC), and when data is later used with GenAI.

According to them, combining their expertise will provide a stronger layer of data protection which has become very necessary. They cite Cyberhaven’s 2026 AI Adoption & Risk Report which shows that almost 40 percent of interactions by employees with GenAI tools increasingly involve some form of personal data.

OCR Studio will be at the starting point of the protective layer by using its on-device and on-premises system to securely extract data from identity documents and bank cards used across the GCC. OCR Studio last December unveiled a new software to ensure faster and more secure on-device identity verification for KYC.

Wemik, for its part, will be in charge of ensuring the protection of all the sensitive personal information already collected through tokenization, “allowing only sanitized text to reach the AI system.” This comes as GenAI systems are becoming a major digital ID data exposure point after KYC, as confirmed by Wemik Co-founder and CTO Jorge Elizalde.

“Employees increasingly rely on AI in their everyday work, which creates an entirely new point of exposure for customer information. Our goal with OCR Studio is to give businesses a way to avoid unnecessary transfers of sensitive data both during KYC and when working with the information afterwards,” he said.

As organizations introduce AI into everyday workflows, they also need controls that prevent the sensitive information extracted from ID documents from being unnecessarily exposed.

Rather than sending sensitive identity information to cloud-based AI models, organizations are increasingly looking to on-device processing, tokenization and privacy-preserving architectures that allow AI systems to work with sanitized data while keeping personal information under customer control. As governments tighten data protection requirements, these approaches are becoming a competitive differentiator for digital identity and KYC providers.

The partnership also comes as GCC countries strengthen data sovereignty requirements, with national privacy laws across the region encouraging organizations to retain greater control over personal data and where it is processed.

Article Topics

data protection  |  digital ID infrastructure  |  identity document  |  KYC  |  OCR Studio  |  tokenization