Verifying the identity of the customers you are dealing with is crucial when conducting business digitally. The ability to perform online identity verification efficiently, securely and swiftly protects from fraud, enhances the customer experience and helps your business achieve and maintain Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance.
The importance of online identity verification
Online identity verification is an important part of the KYC process for customer onboarding, ensuring that there is a real person behind the process and proving that they are who they claim to be before gaining access to the service or platform. This prevents anyone from carrying out a process on other people's behalf without authorization, creating false identities, or committing fraud. There are many reasons why a business needs to have an effective and reliable identity verification process in place. For banks and firms within the financial industry and other verticals such as iGaming, it is a legal requirement for achieving AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC compliance. In today’s digital economy, most online businesses must adhere to KYC requirements to a varying extent. KYC requirements also vary by country but in general entail that the online business is obliged to request proof of identity, age and address from its new customers.
Software as a Service is the go-to solution for digital ID verification
Automated digital ID verification is a must-have for any company conducting business online. It is a prerequisite for achieving KYC compliance efficiently and it makes the identification- and onboarding process simple for both businesses and customers while preventing fraud. It is too cumbersome, time-consuming, and resource-heavy for a business to manually verify the identity data information of prospective and existing customers. The manual approach to remote identification is known for being prone to human errors and causing customer drop-off due to friction and lengthy procedures. The costly project of building an on-site solution may be feasible for a large enterprise but would likely drain the budget and the development capacity of most businesses, especially SMEs. Thus, more and more companies realise the benefits of purchasing the technology they need from third-party vendors and integrating the proven solutions for identity verification that a SaaS company (Software as a Service) provide.
Remote ID verification in the digital age
To get onboarded to an online platform or service with a SaaS-implemented identity verification process, the customer is prompted to provide proof of identity, age and address – and sometimes additional details - using official documentation, such as a passport, driving license, or national ID in combination with submitting a video or selfie. On the receiving end, implemented software featuring a variety of technologies, such as biometrics, AI and machine learning is employed to perform KYC checks. This is to assess the validity of the submitted documentation, match the customer's face to the photo of the identity document and analyse the submitted image or video to decide whether they come from a live person or a fake. Some fraudsters engage in "face spoofing" using silicone masks, printed photographs of other people, or even mannequins to get onboarded or hack into accounts. As more and more businesses move their operations onto a digital platform and embrace more online capabilities, and as technology advances, cybercriminals' methods for committing fraud evolve accordingly.
Today there's an increase of companies with digital cross-border business capabilities, such organisations face different and ever-changing regulatory requirements and must be able to identify customers that are not located in their region. In addition, businesses in the fiercely competitive online market must meet KYC requirements without negatively impacting the customer experience. These are just some reasons why staying up-to-date on best practices and software solutions for online identity verification is so crucial.
The scalability and flexibility of a global SaaS solution for online ID verification
ZignSec provides a comprehensive online identity verification solution for the fully automatic reading and authentication of passports, ID cards, driver’s licenses, visas, and other identity documents. Our ID template database is the largest on the market and contains more than 12,000 document templates from more than 248 countries and territories, covering 138 different languages. Our software and the document template database are constantly updated so our business clients never need to worry about encountering any "unrecognisable" document types. We enable online businesses to verify and authenticate the identity of a person with the help of a comprehensive set of advanced technologies enabling a swift yet meticulous identification process with a level of security equal to that of state border authorities.
We offer a cross-platform solution that allows for the identification and onboarding of customers wherever they are, using any device, and the process requires minimum effort from the customers as well as from the business. On the customer end, the procedure is straightforward with real-time guidance, a minimum amount of action required and technology offering operating capability in almost any ambient light conditions. We can also help businesses achieve state-of-the-art identity verification in their mobile app with our multilingual SDKs for iOS and Android, to which ZignSec will shortly add support for NFC reading which authenticates the document by reading the chip inside it, in the case of online consumers using a biometric passport (e-passport).
Our market-leading solution for remote identity verification automation uses advanced ID document reading and authentication, biometric face matching and liveness detection and delivers complete and comprehensive results in a unified format, in a couple of seconds, to the receiving online business.