Remote Identity Verification (IDV) services are becoming increasingly important to the functioning of essential services, such as banking, healthcare and government services. In highly secure digital environments, South African consumers are asked to scan their face or fingerprint, and this biometric information is cross-checked against the person’s national registered identity. However, with so many digital systems at play, can IDV providers ensure that authentication works each time?
Lance Fanaroff, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of iiDENTIFii says, “As access to digital services in the private and public sector grows, the ability to verify a person’s identity remotely is becoming paramount. It saves citizens hours in queues and reduces costs for those from remote communities who have traditionally had to spend scarce time and resources driving to bank branches to verify their identity and biometrics. This is verified against a person’s registered identity. This requires all systems to be online, or for smart technology to mitigate periods of downtime.”
Across the world, and particularly in South Africa, government systems are embracing new technologies, and innovators are finding ways to bridge the gap.
Fanaroff adds, “Government APIs may experience downtime or become intermittently unavailable. In our work with most of South Africa’s top-tier banks, our technology, referred to as 3D and 4D verification and authentication, is ensuring that periods of downtime don’t have a negative impact on customers who are using digital proof of liveness to verify their identity in order to transact on banking, financial, and government platforms.”
iiDENTIFii is engineered to maintain the continuity of identity verification even when government services are temporarily offline, using 4D liveness detection to drive its primary method of identity verification. This method analyses how the user's face reflects specific sequences of coloured lights, making it highly resilient to deepfake and replay attacks. This "selfie" is verified against existing DHA data, which would usually require the government system to be online at all times — so pressure on the system is reduced with built-in government downtime resilience.
“If a call to a government API returns an error, iiDENTIFii's platform doesn't fail the transaction. It securely re-queues the request and initiates a managed polling sequence — retrying at predefined intervals over a 72-hour window until a valid response is received. Once the authoritative government response is available, iiDENTIFii automatically completes the face match and biometric verification steps and communicates the verified data back to the client’s backend,” says Lance.
This example applies to those verifying their identity for the first time. Banking customers who have already onboarded and verified their face biometrics against their national identity do not have to complete the full process every time they log in and transact. Fanaroff explains, “Our platform is able to recall biometric data using biometric hash technology. A biometric hash is a cryptographic transformation of biometric data into a string of characters that acts like a unique digital finger or face print. It's a one-way process that is achieved without using Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data, meaning it is both secure and private.”
This downtime tolerance capability is not exclusive to any country — it is designed to be configurable and extendable to any government identity authority or database integration, from validating national IDs in Nigeria to pension records in Kenya.
Fanaroff concludes, “As the public and private sector embrace digital identity, we are proud to offer an innovation that mitigates any risks of system downtime and will continue to create products that make digital identity efficient and secure.”
