How to strike a balance between fraud prevention and seamless customer onboarding
Digital identity verification has become a crucial part of onboarding customers, with businesses needing to check that they are genuine, protect customers’ data and mitigate fraud. Having identity verification embedded into your online customer journey ensures you have identified and verified your customers’ identities.
Even so, it can be challenging to establish a balance. Finding the best way to streamline the customer’s digital experience while complying with know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) industry requirements isn’t easy. Businesses are often forced to choose between robust security to prevent fraud or providing a frictionless user onboarding experience.
Competition is tough, no matter the industry. Businesses are focused on making the online customer journey faster and more streamlined. The call is often to reduce the level of friction experienced to keep customers coming back. While this could speed up onboarding and transaction processes, it will cost your business a customers’ trust and puts your online services at risk of misuse.
Customers need to trust your business with their personal information, and they also expect a certain level of friction. Digital identity verification is necessary friction that is an essential factor in building trust with customers remotely.
Every industry is different, and their need for a verification system will differ, which is why a digital identity verification solution needs to be flexible and scalable enough to meet those needs. The correct identity verification method can help you strike a balance between KYC requirements and having the right level of friction that doesn’t negatively impact the customer experience. Let’s look at how you can achieve that balance.
How do you streamline the identity verification process?
Our Identity Verification solution makes the onboarding process simple while protecting your business, ensures you’re in line with KYC, AML compliance and helps you reduce drop off rates.
Our verification system fits within your current user flow without disrupting your customers. It is a cross-platform solution that allows you to integrate your way.
We give you a complete solution that lets you:
- Verify the identities of your customers your way. Simply configure the checks you need in line with your industry and security requirements. Only pay for the types of checks you need your users to complete. For example, if you just need to capture an image of your users’ ID document or require matching the person in real-time to the image on their ID, you only configure those types of checks to be carried out.
- Deliver the right level of friction after onboarding. For higher-risk industries, we can enhance the type of checks you need. Our Identity Verification solution is scalable and gives you the capability to integrate our other solutions into your user flow. Let’s say you’re in the gambling industry. You already use our Identity Verification solution and now need to perform age checks. You can save the high-assurance identity checks for those that need them. With our facial age estimation technology, you can keep the onboarding process free of checks and scan accounts at scale. This allows you to detect the most at-risk accounts and introduce friction to those most likely to not be the required age by asking them to prove their age with an ID document.
- Connect with our solution to fit the size of your business. For a fully-branded customer experience, you can place our verification technology in your existing flow with our SDKs built for web, mobile web and native mobile apps. For smaller businesses that require low-volume checks, it’s not always worth the time and resources to integrate. Our no-code portal lets you send your customers to complete the verification flow via a web link and manage the results in a simple dashboard.
- Protect your customers’ data. Quickly verify the identity of your customers and receive a granular view of checks and an overall recommendation. We offer you flexible data retention options to reduce your exposure to data leaks and ensure GDPR compliance. Businesses can store the data encrypted on our servers and call API for results without having to store the information on their systems.
- Scale globally and securely. We support 1,000 ID documents from over 200 countries, allowing you to scale globally and serve multiple jurisdictions. Our identity verification specialists are expertly trained in verifying documents from across the globe, helping you detect fraud and reduce the cost of damages.
How do your customers prove who they are?
The user flow gives your customers a simple way to prove who they are with just a government-issued ID document and a biometric selfie.
Robust identity verification in 3 steps:
- Select the issuing country and type of ID – passport, ePassport, or driving license.
- Take a photo of the front and back of the document via a mobile phone or computer camera.
- Take a selfie using a phone or computer camera.
See how it works
Seamless identity verification directly on your website or app
How do we verify your customer’s identity?
Our hybrid of leading artificial intelligence (AI) technology is enhanced by a team of expertly-trained identity verification specialists. Using a combined approach helps to make our verification systems more accurate, secure and faster at detecting misuse.
Let’s look at the different identity verification methods.
Document verification
- Data extraction: We extract data from a document using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from the document’s visual zone or by reading Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) or barcodes. We read the PDF417 barcodes whenever it’s present (for example, on North American documents where it is printed on the back of the card). For ePassports, our native mobile SDKs can read the chip data, including the photo, using Near Field Communication (NFC).
- We also can verify the digital signatures as part of the document’s authenticity checks. We use a combination of data extraction methods, both automatic and manual, to ensure we have an optimum solution for each document type within the wide range of documents we support. Depending on your business’s risk appetite, you can choose to configure our verification system to ‘fallback’ to manual data extraction or to ‘always’ have a human check the data extraction, even if the automatic extraction was successful.
- Document authenticity checks: We use a combination of world-leading AI and dedicated 24/7 identity verification specialists to perform multiple checks. Our hybrid approach ensures that ID document checks determine that they are original, not a copy or damaged and that the document doesn’t have signs of tampering. This provides the highest level of assurance that an ID document is genuine.
Facial verification
- Biometric liveness detection: To ensure your users are real and to prevent spoofing attacks, our AI liveness detection confidently detects that a person is physically present when the image is captured. We can accurately detect that the image is not an automated bot. Likewise, it is not a bad actor wearing a mask or using a photo of someone else.
- Biometric face match: We assess whether the user’s face matches the face on the checked ID document.
We can enhance the checks as per industry requirements.
Proof of address verification
Receive a proof of address document or verify a customer’s address -they can upload a supporting document like a utility bill or bank statement.
Checking a customer’s address can be done in two parts:
- Capture an image of the supporting document, and using OCR technology, we can also extract the address information and manually review the data.
- Verify the customer’s address against a relevant third-party database.
Trusted third-party database checks
We can check your customer’s name, date of birth, or address against an official database for additional security.
AML watchlist screening
You can screen your customer’s details against the following major global databases:
- Sanctions and watchlists: We can screen customers’ profiles against 1,000 global government regulatory and law enforcement watchlists and over 100 International and National Sanctions lists, updated in real-time.
- Politically Exposed Persons (PEP): In high-risk situations where customers are linked to higher-risk countries or business sectors, businesses can comply with enhanced due diligence (EDD) regulations by screening against a database of more than 5,000 structured sources that are monitored daily.
- Adverse media: We screen against the world’s most accurate database of adverse information and media entities, collated into a comprehensive, structured profile through machine learning classification techniques. Relevant adverse articles related to a single entity are collated in one structured profile with FATF-aligned categorisation.
- Ongoing monitoring: We can monitor a user’s profiles or entities on an ongoing basis with automated adverse information and media monitoring. You can receive alerts to any changes in a customer or business client’s risk status against real-time databases.
Know your customers and protect each other against fraud
Make it more convenient for your customers while protecting them and your business. Our identity verification system is intuitive and recognises that you need to strike a balance between stopping fraud and having the right level of friction necessary without impacting the customer experience.
For more information, please contact:
Katherine Holden
Katherine joined techUK in May 2018 and currently leads the Data Analytics, AI and Digital ID programme.
