You want the digital experiences your business offers customers to be highly functional and efficient. At the same time, customers expect a seamless online experience, as well as frictionless and secure payment choices.
In order to meet those needs, verifying your customer’s identity with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning should be a fundamental first step for every business to deliver better online customer onboarding processes.
However, many companies are still relying on outdated processes, causing unnecessary friction for customers and exposing their businesses to errors and potential costly reputational damage.
Automating certain parts of the identity verification process with AI encourages digital user experiences without compromising usability. It also provides better security and protects your customers, business and services from fraud in the digital world.
Here’s our guide to why you need the process and why our solution can provide you with the right level of automated identity verification.
What is automated identity verification?
Automated identity verification uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to strengthen the verification process. With a higher level of security and more efficient ID checks, it’s easier than ever to prove who your customers really are.
In the broader sense, automation can support essential business needs:
- Improve internal operations
- Increase response time
- Assist in necessary manual checks
- Reduce costly errors
- Get higher success rates
- Provide more accurate, quality data for better decision making
What does your company achieve with automation?
When you automate, you can:
- Have a streamlined user experience: Provide a smoother experience for customers. Achieve a faster onboarding process and reduce drop off rates.
- Handle spikes in the volumes of onboarding: By automating some or most parts of the process, you can reduce the time taken to verify new users manually and improve your team’s speed.
- Design your own user flows: With automation, you choose where to add verification within your carefully crafted user experience.
- Reduce internal costs: Using automated processes allows you to choose how much of the verification process to optimise, making it cheaper for you and more efficient for customers.
- Scale globally across multiple jurisdictions: Entering new markets is challenging, but with automation, you will successfully serve multiple jurisdictions without increasing cost. Plus, your teams are better equipped to verify users in newer markets in line with regional regulations.
- Make AML, KYC processes more robust: Automated AML helps teams check and investigate more profiles a lot faster than manual evaluation. Provide your teams with accurate quality data and the capability to react quickly to detected misuse. Your teams can mitigate risk and reduce the possibility of exposing your customers or business to fraud.
What processes can be automated?
With our complete solution, you can automate any part of the verification process, from the document and facial verification to anti-money laundering watchlist screening. This way the level of automation you use works alongside your industry requirements.
Here’s what processes you can automate:
- Data extraction checks. We extract data using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from the document’s visual zone or by reading Machine Readable Zone (MRZ), barcodes or PDF417 barcodes whenever present (On North American documents it is printed on the back of the card). Using Near Field Communication (NFC) for ePassports, we can read the chip data, including the photo.
- ID document authenticity checks. Our AI and machine learning systems can do multiple comprehensive checks on an ID document to ensure valid data. We scan the document against police databases to check they are not fraudulent, reported, lost or stolen. We test to ensure that the document is original (not a copy or damaged) and doesn’t have signs of tampering.
- Biometric face match. Using machine learning, we assess whether the user’s face matches the face on the checked ID document. Our systems can quickly evaluate the face of customers against their ID’s image to identify and match their characteristics accurately.
- Liveness detection. Our AI confidently detects that a person is physically present to prevent spoofing attacks and checks that your user is a real person. 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.
- Address verification. To assist your teams when needing to complete proof of address, we’ll extract customer address information from supporting documents like a utility bill or bank statement using OCR technology. We’ll check their name, date of birth, or address against an official third-party database.
- AML watchlist screening. Your compliance teams can automatically screen extracted customer details against thousands of AML databases as part of the identity verification process:
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- Sanctions and watchlists. Against 1,000 global government regulatory and law enforcement watchlists and over 100 International and National Sanctions lists.
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- Politically Exposed Persons (PEP). To comply with enhanced due diligence (EDD) regulations, we can screen customers against a database of more than 5,000 structured sources that are monitored daily.
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- Adverse media. We screen against the world’s most accurate database of adverse information and media entities. The data is collated into a comprehensive, structured profile through machine learning classification techniques. Relevant adverse articles related to a single entity are presented in one structured profile with FATF-aligned categorisation.
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- 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.
What are the challenges of automated identity verification?
While automation can benefit your business with improved processes and help get customers through faster, it doesn’t replace human experts with knowledge and experience in verification.
A combination of automation and human experts is needed for those tricker submissions. That is why we champion a hybrid approach. This approach provides a balance of automation for some, and where required, an added layer of security that automation is not capable of delivering to the process.
Our leading AI technology is enhanced with our expertly-trained identity verification specialists. Layering in verification specialists gives you a 100 per cent document submission rate. It provides you with a multifaceted defence against fraud.
As a result, your platform is built on solid identity verification that is more accurate, secure, and faster to detect misuse.