Trusted identity verification for eKYC

Traditional ID verification requires face to face meet up, manual verification, and paper forms filing. These methods are usually considered as inefficient, low accuracy, and high cost. The COVID-19 pandemic brings even greater challenge for the traditional verification methods. Our digital verification makes it possible to use biometric technology on a smartphone to reliably verify identity remotely. The solution also helps financial institutes to save cost on manpower, reduce paper form usage, improve verification accuracy, and operation efficiency.

We believe with more global adoption, our solution will help to reduce virus spread during COVID-19 pandemic, bring financial service to more people and bring financial inclusion.

Half of Bangladesh adults remain unbanked due to the lack of trusted identity. The situation is even more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many unprivileged people lost their income, yet government assistance package has difficulties to reach to them. Traditional ways of verification have stopped working due to lockdowns in many countries.

The solution we offer helps not only the financial institutions but also the end-users to open accounts. With improved customer due diligence, anti-money laundering prevention is enhanced and transaction fraud is reduced. The government social distress package can reach the unprivileged people better.  

Globally, there is a bigger problem to solve. The estimated unbanked population is 1.7 billion as of today. If we offer similar services in all countries, we believe many more people will have access to equal financial services.

The proposed solution helps financial institutions to verify user identity remotely following the regulatory standard. End-users can now open their electronic account and make digital transactions online.

The solution is easy to use, secure, and contact-free. It enables users to prove identity and complete biometric verification on their phone, with strong potential to be applied in broader markets. The solution does not require a face to face meetup thus reducing the exposure for people to the COVID-19 virus. It opens up a new trend to make more transaction digital, including but not limited to food delivery, eCommerce, mobile top-up, receiving government relief fund, using consumption e-vouchers, P2P transfer, and more.

The solution uses reliable facial recognition, strong liveness detection, and smart identity document recognition to significantly reduce the risk associated with pure online identity proofing transactions. It also verifies user identity information against government agencies automatically. It is faster and more accurate than human agents meeting customers face to face. 

The solution has a built-in fraud engine to detect invalid identity documents, face presentation attacks, and malicious users to safeguard the operations. 

With identity card anti-spoofing technology, our fraud engine can effectively detect tampered with cards, photocopies of cards, fake cards, and cards on screens. With ISO-30107-3 PAD Level 2 tested facial recognition, our fraud engine can detect attacks using photos, video replays and 3D printed masks. The false-positive rate is as low as 1/1,000,000. With security policy, our fraud engine can automatically identify and block malicious users submitting invalid information. 

The applications screened by our system have more than 90% automatic approval rate. Our solution improved both accuracy and operation efficiency.

Our e-KYC technology simplifies the account creation process. A prime example of an emerging market implementing such technology is Bangladesh.

With the introduction of e-KYC by bKash, the country’s largest mobile financial service provider and local e-wallet partner of Alipay, customers from rural areas can open a bank account simply by scanning their national identity card and taking a photo using their mobile phones. Within 3 months, more than 3.5 million users successfully registered using our technology. The success rate also increased to more than 90%. The average waiting time reduced from a few days to 3 minutes. In addition, the local government recently started using bKash’s mobile service to distribute financial aid to verified distressed families, highlighting the importance of making such accounts more accessible, especially to vulnerable groups. With e-KYC, Bangladesh is now a step closer to total financial inclusion by 2024, a five-year goal set by the country’s government. During COVID-19, more than 2 million textile workers switched to bKash for receiving their salary. More than 65% of the workers are female. Our solution helped the workers to reduce virus exposure of dealing with cash.

Our observations in Indonesia also showed that nearly half of the applications submitted through e-KYC platforms were successfully processed within three minutes, compared with a typical waiting time of at least two hours using traditional manual review processes. 

Remote might be a new norm. The challenge is how do we ensure identity is safe and can be trusted remotely? 

With the development of new technology, AI can now recognize documents and faces better than humans. With the new digital infrastructure offered by the government, biometric features can be verified against authoritative sources. 

Smartphone penetration is increasing year over year gradually. More and more services are moving toward digital. The world needs better digital identity system. The digital identity technology will evolve further in the future, and our attempts are the first big step towards the future.

The solution works with a mobile side SDK as well as a server API component. It can be provided to a government authority to help companies to verify identity digitally without leaking biometric data by helping financial institutions to verify customer-submitted information. It can also be provided to financial institutions who need to verify user identity remotely. Subsequently, user authentication and authorization may be done using facial recognition as well.

During the ID capturing process, the end-user only needs to take a photo of their ID card. A real-time quality check by AI will be performed on the server-side. if the image captured did not meet the quality standard, a clear explanation will be given to the user immediately so the user can try again.

During the face capturing process, the end-user will only need to face the mobile front camera and perform a required pose by the application. The experience is very similar to the selfie-taking process. Our statistic data shows that more than 98% of the users can pass on the first try and the whole process on average is completed within 3 seconds, making it a user-friendly and easy solution for those at the base of the pyramid with little digital literacy.

The server-side API is the standard RESTful API, which is interoperable with almost all programming languages today. The client software also supports a wide range of mobile devices, including Android from 5.0, iOS from 8.0, which covers combined more than 99% of today's smartphone operating system. Furthermore, we have a web view product to make it possible to complete verification in the browser. This further enables organizations that don't have a mobile app to take advantage of our technology.

As most of the backend components are API based, it is possible to replace one or more core functionalities to equivalent third party API, but still make the process working similarly. 

Our solution can trim the payload to less than 75KB in size on average. The average transfer time required for the authentication is less than 3 seconds in low connectivity situations like the 3G network.

The solution also has built-in assistance to help users to complete easier. It contains steps to step guide with animation to help to understand the process.  Users with low literacy can get an assistant from agents or family to pass the verification easily.

Our technology serviced more than 40 million users outside of China. Together with more than 600 million users in Alipay already using our solution, we service more than 640 million users globally.

We plan to serve 80 million people outside China this year and 1.2 billion people all over the world in five years. 

We expect to bring the solution to more markets by partnering with local partners like e-wallets, banks, and micro-finance institutions.  We will be focusing in Pakistan, Myanmar this year. We hope by 2025, our solution can service 1.2 billion people around the world.

Regulation restriction, smartphone penetration, and user acceptance level about the biometric application.

We hope to share other countries' success stories and proven record to facilitate regulators’ understanding of trusted remote identity technology.  We also plan to start pilot projects with leading mobile finance application operators to launch our solution in new markets, accumulate local experience, demonstrate the value of the product, and roll out to broader markets.

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The team has about 50 full-time employees based in Singapore and China (Beijing). Most of them are engineers and AI researchers. We also hired a few contractors for testing and project delivery.

We have been working on facial recognition and its application in the financial services industries for more than 5 years by now. Before the team is founded, Alipay had widely deployed face-based verification of identity to completely automate user identification in China and services hundreds of millions of people. The team started with rich knowledge and unique technology about face recognition and related fraud management. This includes accuracy testing, anti-spoofing certification, etc. We are one of the few companies that passed ISO 30107 LEVEL 2 PAD tests. 

This is not a complete list but we are partnering with eMoney operator bKash in Bangladesh, gCash in the Philippines， Dana in Indonesia, TnGD in Malaysia, and TrueMoney in Thailand.

They are our customers, as well as partners because our solution was first publicly used in these countries, and it was first of its kind in the countries too. We built and improved the product over a few iterations together. 

We sell our technical solutions to financial service providers to help them to serve their end-users. The product suite includes remote user onboarding (KYC) and remote user authentication.

We are well funded as an Ant Group (parent of Alipay) affiliate.

We based on the user acquired with our solution. We believe that as the number of users acquired increases, we will be self sufficient in the coming years.

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US$ 10M

1. Mission billion calls for solutions that ensure the inclusivity of ID systems for vulnerable groups, particularly during physical distancing requirements, which is exactly what we have been doing in the past few years.

2. With a tested track record and visible development impact achieved during the COVID-19, we hope to share our experience via Mission Billion platform, so that more stakeholders and countries could enhance their awareness and practice of this feasible and scalable solution – trusted identity verification for eKYC.

3. We believe in the future digital economy will grow in popularity gradually. The COVID-19 pandemic boosted the digitization in many countries. Yet, there are still many works to be done in financial services and we want this to be a good opportunity to influence the development community positively and foster joint efforts.

Financial institutes, regulators and media partners.