The continuous expansion and evolution of the digital ecosystem is creating new opportunities for fraud, money laundering and other illicit financial activity to exploit digital-based services.
While the shift to remote and automated KYC verification of potential customers has allowed countless new companies to flourish without the need for costly and time-consuming manual KYC checks – it’s almost inevitable that criminals eventually catch up and find ways to subvert established security protocols.
The good news is that technological developments are also keeping up and producing serious challenges to the very real threats posed by criminals.
As the risk of digital identity fraud and financial crime continues to evolve, the need for adequate technological responses is imperative.
Although selfie scans and ID document uploads have become a benchmark KYC process for numerous financial and crypto-based services over the last several years, the technical capacity of fraudsters has been keeping pace.
Advanced image manipulation that is used for “Presentation Attacks” – spoof attempts at using anything from so-called “deepfakes” to cut-out photographs and fabricated screen displays, videos or even masks – means that there is a critical need for enhanced image verification.
Enter KYC-Chain’s Passive Liveness feature.
What is it?
KYC-Chain’s end-to-end workflow solution uses an industry-leading technology known as Passive Liveness. It precisely determines whether a single frame in a captured and submitted selfie is genuine.
Passive Liveness technology is an evolution of its predecessor – Active Liveness detection – which involves prompting certain actions and gesture-based gimmicks from onboarded individuals (like asking them to blink, move their eyes or say a random passcode
Conversely, passive liveness evaluates the validity of a selfie without compelling a user to perform a series of actions, such as to “turn left, turn right” etc. By automatically scanning and evaluating an image, Passive Liveness brings some key advantages:
- It significantly reduces friction in the onboarding process, and can thus reduce mid-onboarding abandonment rates.
- It reduces fraud. Passive liveness obscures the verification processes that are being taken from users and potential fraudsters, reducing the latter’s access to information that could potentially be used to try and “hack” the system in the future.
The Passive Liveness feature KYC-Chain uses is a new technological breakthrough: prior systems were simply not able to reach ISO 30107-3 Level 1 compliance from a single image.
The removal of the need to capture video or multiple images for ID verification also means reduced processing times and data transmission, allowing for smoother and more efficient onboarding processes.
Passive liveness and ID verification
Our Passive Liveness feature is integrated within the individual onboarding process. Once a Passive Liveness test has been successfully completed on a user, our facial recognition technology cross references the image with the ID document that has been uploaded by the user.
ID documents are also seamlessly captured and verified using smart auto-capture technology that is able to automatically crop and straighten a camera-captured ID document, and then to use a series of checks to ensure its validity. These include:
- White image analysis – checking that the visible aspects of the document have not been tampered with, and that the portrait image matches that of the captured selfie.
- Infrared analysis – checking for security features that are invisible to the naked eye.
- Ultraviolet analysis – scanning for security features such as holograms.
As well as these physical checks, ID details are also checked against a comprehensive list of national cadasters and government databases.
By combining these two key verification processes – selfie and ID document authentication, KYC-Chain’s end-to-end workflow solution can establish with market-leading and compliant degrees of certainty that an individual is who they say they are.
And it all happens near-instantaneously, with less friction, maintaining a seamless and positive experience for your potential customer.
Are you interested in integrating Passive Liveness in your company’s onboarding process to make it more seamless, user-friendly and fraud-resistant? Get in touch and we can have a conversation about the ways KYC-Chain can help.
