Welcome on board, we’ve been expecting you: ID verification by Onfido

Many organizations need to be careful which customers they sign up. While financial institutions are prime examples, the ubiquity of digital transactions today means that KYC (know your customer) compliance is now mandatory for many.

While federal legislation preventing money laundering and other financial crimes is long-standing, a raft of new regulations is making compliance tougher than ever before. That’s because identity theft is on the rise. The profits from such activity are very attractive – identity fraud cost the United States $16.8 billion in 2017 alone. Identity theft can be achieved by pulling together data on a victim from all sorts of seemingly innocuous sources which, thanks to the recent rise of data hacks and breaches, are now easily accessible.

Companies are rightly keen, therefore, to protect themselves and their genuine customers from these types of malicious activities. But increasingly stringent compliance measures can turn potential customers off, stifling organizations’ ability to scale.

There’s a company, Onfido, whose services are trusted by the likes of Remitly,  Zipcar and Indiegogo. They use it to digitally verify their users’ identities, making the process slicker, more secure, and more scalable.

Source: Onfido

The problem often faced by companies or organizations deploying any form of identity verification is that there’s usually a high drop-out rate. In short, the necessity of scanning a driver’s license or passport and then emailing it (or a similarly troublesome series of steps) would mean that many just give up.

What Onfido offers is a number of verification methods which are in line with the speed at which today’s consumers live and interact digitally. Potential sign-ups use their mobile to snap their passport, ID or license – in-app or on the web. It’s fast and it’s secure.

In addition to ID checks, your potential customer can take a selfie (or even shoot video of themselves), comparing their facial biometrics against their government ID to prevent impersonation. And the great thing for any organization using Onfido is that the back-end process of verification is based on a hybrid of machine-learning and human involvement. While the tech delivers speed and scalability, human experts are on hand to review edge cases and ensure that the system keeps pace with even the most sophisticated fraud as it evolves.

When an ID is scanned, the data is used immediately to autofill the applicant’s details. Onfido’s Flash verification route means checks are completed in less than 15 seconds. Onboarding conversion rates can rise by as much as 40 percent. Why? Because the user’s experience is seamless, fast, and efficient. Rather than wait days, customers complete further steps in-app or online, while the verification processes take place in the background.

Facial recognition algorithms in the Onfido platform are capable of differentiating between doctored photographic ID, pictures of faces, forged documents, expired credentials and the real deal. It all takes place in seconds.

Source: Onfido

In the past, any organization needing to verify its customers’ identities has had to subject them to various ‘hoop-jumps’ and long waiting times. The Onfido platform swings the balance between verification integrity and speed into line with the rate of people’s lives today.

The Onfido-powered verification process is significantly more effective in ensuring people are who they claim to be, as well as being faster and more efficient. Compare a badly Xerox-ed passport sent via snail mail with a video that shows the customer’s face from three angles, complete with audio, to ensure they’re really present and haven’t just scooped a picture of a stranger off Facebook.

At the same time, users of Onfido benefit from massive reductions in manual processing overheads. On any ID submission, the Onfido algorithms return an acceptance recommendation metric in seconds.

So how does it work? Essentially, you build your app on the platform(s) of your choice and then integrate standard calls to the RESTful API in the Onfido cloud.

There are SDKs available for iOS and Android, plus an SDK that provides components for any JavaScript-based application. For your dev teams, too, there are libraries for PHP, Ruby, Python, and bash environments.

Banks, financial institutions, payments providers and trading platforms need to jump over higher and higher bars of compliance – the Bank Secrecy Act, reports to FinCEN, (or GDPR and CIFAS membership criteria in the UK, for example). And as new companies blur the lines between traditional finance and digital life, many more need to verify ID.

And when it’s time to expand out across the world to new markets in remote geographies, the Onfido platform’s scope is ready. The company verifies over six thousand ID document types from across the world.

Onfido provides a service which is suited to the lifestyle of today’s customers: it’s fast, secure, highly compliant and is powered in the cloud.

To find out more about the Onfido offering, get in touch today with a local representative, or attend a live product demo online.