This year we have seen a dramatic shift in the way businesses transact with their clients on a digital level. Due to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, regulated firms have adopted remote digital ID document verification processes to onboard their customers, in order to generate revenue whilst meeting regulatory compliance on a much wider scale.
Despite the advancement towards digital ID document verification, there is a transition phase whilst businesses use a combination of legacy manual processes and documents, together with new digital forms of identity verification.
Physical identity documents include; passports, driving licences, biometric residence permits (BRPs), identity cards and birth certificates. Digital identity uses the body of information about an individual, organisation or their electronic device that exists online to identify that individual. Examples of data points that can help form a digital identity include facial biometric data, social media accounts or purchasing behaviour.
In the absence of universal digital identities that can be used across services and cross-border digital identity, electronic identity document verification services solve a key problem: how to prove a person’s identity for access to online/remote services?
It is only through the combination of physical identity document verification and digital identity that firms can onboard their customer with confidence. Having a robust Electronic Identity Document Verification (EIDV) is critical for any remote onboarding solution. Compliance and risk management leaders must balance robust EIDV processing, to reduce fraud and ensure compliance, whilst also providing a friction-free customer journey.
The challenge to global ID document verification
Thousands of ID documents, each with unique individual features
The number of different types of identification documents currently in circulation runs into the thousands. According to the U.N some 195 countries now produce their own passports, ID cards, driving licenses and residence permits (source). Between them, they launch approximately 150 new identification documents each year, while retiring a great many others. Bear in mind that each of these documents is based on a unique combination of design elements and security features. For example, the machine-readable zone, the RFID chip, photo protection techniques, UV and/or IR features, the watermark, the security thread or any number of security solutions such as an ImagePerf.
In practice, this diversity of global identity makes it very difficult to establish the authenticity of identification documents when onboarding clients from different countries.
Detecting Fraudulent Documents
Added to this we are also seeing a sharp rise in identity fraud. Back in 2017, Cifas announced that UK identity fraud had reached “epidemic levels” with incidents occurring at a rate of 500 per day. According to their Fraudscape annual report, things are only getting worse, with over 223,000 cases of identity theft reported in 2019, 18% up on 2018 and amounting to 61% of all cases of fraud reported to the NFD.
The most common types of ID fraud involve counterfeit, stolen or lost documents, the use of a different photograph (photo substitution), or fraudulently obtained genuine documents. Unfortunately, identity fraud has only been exacerbated due to the pandemic, as opportunist criminals use the current climate to their advantage.
Investing in the right electronic ID document verification
NorthRow has Partnered with GBG
To help our customers identify fraudulent documents and improve document verification pass rates NorthRow has partnered with GBG IDScan. IDScan has a database of hundreds of different identity documents from around the world and takes just seconds to compare the security features of a supplied ID document with the expected security features within that source area, to determine if that document is likely to be genuine.
