What is identity verification?
Identity verification helps organisations ensures that an individual is who s/he claims to be. It is one of the primary practices that organisations use before onboarding categories like:
1) New employees
2) Partners (like delivery partners, or gig workers)
3) Customers (for KYC and AML in case of financial institutions)
4) Merchants (in the case of e-commerce)
What is digital identity verification?
COVID-19 gave birth to new fraud types and skyrocketed the existing ones. Impersonation by job applicants, identity theft, account takeovers at financial institutions, etc. One could name a fraud type and notice a drastic increase in the risk related. As, physical identity verification processes had become irrelevant. And, fraudsters had picked up on the absence of an appropriate solution.
Fortunately, digital identity verification came to us as a saviour. It came with remote, faster and more accurate ways to detect identity fraud.
Cut to the present day, organisations can now use digital id checks to remotely verify job applicants, customers, partners, or merchants. They can ensure safety without making either party step out of their homes.
Methods like digital ID document verification, biometric test, liveness detection, and more have given organisations an edge over the fraudsters.
Let’s look at what these methods are and what do they mean.
The process of verifying the identity of a user digitally
The ‘user’ here means any person who is a prospective employee, partner, merchant, or customer.
Digital ID verification compares the information presented by a person (ID document, photograph, etc.) with the information from a legit database (usually a government database). It is non-manual, error-free, and gives instant results.
For example, if a person submits an Aadhaar number, the system will check it against UIDAI’s database. It’ll verify if the Aadhaar number is linked to the person presenting it. For the same, it’ll compare details like name, date of birth, address of residence, and gender across the two sources.
The above was an example of digital ID document verification. Yet, organisations use a series of digital methods to ensure accurate identification of an individual. They are:
- Digital ID Document Verification:
Checks if the ID (e.g., driver’s license, passport, government ID) is legitimate.
- Face compare:
Compares a person’s selfie to the portrait that appears on their ID to check if both are the same person
- Liveness Detection:
Checks if a selfie is genuine by detecting image tampering like face masks or photos of photos.
- One-time Passcode (OTP) Verification:
Sends a single-use passcode on a person’s number/email address that is registered with the authorized database
- Trusted Identity Network:
Leverages the applicant’s existing credentials with another provider to verify their identity and reduce friction during the onboarding process
- Database methods:
These leverage data from social media, offline databases, and other sources to verify the information submitted by the applicant.
Note: These methods usually follow one after the other in the same order to ensure safety and avoid errors.
What are the three methods used to verify identity?
The current three widely used digital methods are:
- Digital ID document verification,
- Face compare
- Face liveness
Let’s look at them one by one.
How does digital ID document verification work?
Digital ID document verification uses APIs that help the system capture the document via an image, extract information from it, and verify it across an authorized database.
To understand better, let us consider a ‘candidate’ as an individual who is being verified and ‘you’ as the verifier:
1.Your candidates don’t need to visit you in person. They can click pictures of their ID documents and send them your way for verification.
2. APIs like ‘document alignment’ and ‘document validation’ will ensure that you get the correct and readable documents in one go (no to and fro).
3. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) APIs will read the data on documents, extract it, and fill it in appropriate columns for future reference. Simply put, this will allow you to automate your data entry.
4. Digital ID document verification APIs, ensure that you get instant verification results for checks like Aadhaar, PAN, driving license, and more.
Wondering what APIs in background verification is? Click here.
Also, read more about digital document verification here.
Face compare and liveness detection for digital ID verification and fraud prevention
Face comparison extracts a set of data from a person’s picture. For eg., the position of his nose, the gap between two eyes, etc. Further, the digital system compares the data to the data extracted from the portrait in the person’s verified ID document. If the match score is acceptable, it’s established that the ID belongs to the person presenting it.
Yet, there is a difference between facial recognition and facial comparison. You can read about it here.
Further, with the extensive photo editing options available, fraudsters tend to tamper with pictures to get past the verification. Therefore, organisations are currently adopting face liveness technology to detect image tampering.
The future of identity verification services and digital identity verification
When looking for id verification as a service, one has to understand that the future lies in focusing on safety, speed and user experience.
Users today expect a friction-less verification process. 84% of consumers say that a good onboarding experience is as important as a company’s products and services. Organisations must ensure a modern approach to document verification to meet user expectations.
At IDfy, we have carefully curated a background verification journey that treats your candidates the best.
Here’s what it delivers:
- A frictionless candidate journey
- A user-friendly interface
- Mobile friendly usage
- Lowest turn around time
- Accurate and