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With technology turning heads in 2021, digital solutions are all over the place. The constant shift in customer interests has inclined businesses to develop such solutions that address user concerns and align with their motives. But as the world grew technologically smart, so did fraudsters with their sophisticated methods to carry out identity theft and digital fraud. For enterprises, identity-related breaches can hurt their market reputation as they take a toll on customers and their personal information directly. In 2020, almost 1.38 million identity theft cases emerged, which is an alarming number for business entities and their potential customers.
With the COVID-19 pandemic having no signs of closing, social distancing becomes a definite requirement. Considering the SOPs, digital payment systems have skyrocketed and are growing in demand each day. For these service providers and businesses, it is necessary to come up with a robust means of identity verification that guarantees legitimate customer onboarding and secure checkout procedures. Document authentication is one such tool that allows enterprises to perform verification of their user’s and their identities through their original ID documents.
User Verification through ID Documents
These days, before opening an account with a business, customers undergo some kind of user verification to make sure they are who they claim to be. Customer onboarding procedures during account openings are carried out to ensure user legitimacy towards the business entity. Often termed as the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, these checks play a crucial role in mitigating financial crime like money laundering in the long run.
KYC and other Customer Due Diligence (CDD) procedures are best performed using document verification services. Paired with biometric-based facial recognition and two-factor authentication, it allows businesses to make the best out of intelligent verification solutions. All the customer is required to do is submit their ID document and a photo of their face (selfie) and the rest of the procedure is taken care of by the document authentication solution in real-time.
The Role of AI in Document Verification
With artificial intelligence and its derivative subfields like computer vision and machine learning, there has been much development in the identity verification industry. Apart from that, they also provide a lot of corporate benefits from automating customer onboarding to enhancing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for better data extraction to make data entry procedures efficient and reliable. Taking down facial spoof attacks and potentially synthetic ID documents is all possible through intelligent document authentication.
Before all this digitization, Know Your Customer was carried out by human experts. The process took unnecessary waiting times and was often prone to errors and mistakes. Moreover, there was no way to ensure if a document was legitimate or not through a remote verification possess. Now, with digital document authentication solutions in place, the verification is secure and streamlined.
Below are listed some features that a document authentication service looks for while checking the originality of ID documents.
Is the Format Accurate?
Many KYC providers in the IDV market offer document authentication services that look if the user document is in the right format or not. For example, a national ID card of a UK citizen will be supported by most of the document verification solutions out there since it’s pretty common. On the other hand, the document verification solution will have trouble recognizing custom-generated retail slip at the payment store. The format of the document is verified before other authenticity checks are performed.
Checks on the MRZ Data
Most documents often come with a Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) that stores the personally identifiable information (PII) of the end-user. AI-based document originality checks scan the MRZ code that extracts the personal data of the user. The details are then used to verify if the person is who they actually show. Any inconsistencies in the extracted data and the MRZ data means that the document was possibly modified or photoshopped.
Checking for Missing Features
Original documents issued by the government have an official hologram or rainbow print or mark that confirms their authenticity. Digital document verification powered by artificial intelligence looks for these missing features that help businesses to take down fabricated and synthetic IDs used in ID fraud.