How do you do trust someone you can’t meet in person? It’s a question organisations have been grappling with in the age of the internet, KYC requirements and the rapidly escalating costs and consequences of identity fraud.
“Enter biometrics with liveness detection, a state-of-the-art solution that onboards customers securely, easily, and quickly,” says Lance Fanaroff, co-founder and chief strategy officer, iiDENTIFii .
Traditional facial recognition methods have been rendered almost obsolete as fraudsters use sophisticated spoofs that exhibit human traits including photos, videos, deep fake puppets, masks and dolls. “Even authentication processes with gesture and motion requirements to overcome this problem can be thwarted. Blinking your eyes and moving your head is inadequate and can still be spoofed,” says Fanaroff.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful weapon in the fight against identity fraud which increased by a staggering 337 percent in 2020, according to the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service (SAFPS) and cost the South African government R1 billion in bogus Covid-19 relief claims.
“The most effective way to close the glaring identity gap is through AI biometrics which uses liveness detection to determine that it is interfacing with a genuine, physically present human being before they are even asked to present a valid ID document, which is a big deterrent to fraudsters who do not want their real faces on camera,” notes Fanaroff.
He adds that identity fraud has historically been difficult to detect and even harder to combat as fake identities look just like real customers. “Gaps in fraud prevention capabilities partly stem from human error as well as an absence of source data to verify individual identities. AI can proactively mitigate fraud with real-time detection far quicker and more accurately than any human can. iiDENTIFii’s own remote biometric digital authentication technology can verify and automatically on-board a person in under 30 seconds.
This pioneering technology has already been extensively tried and stress-tested at scale in South Africa. 4d liveness™ as we refer to it at iiDENTIFii, is, at this point in time, the most spoof-resistant method of remote digital biometric authentication.”
