Counterfeit and forged ID documents are found yearly by law enforcement officers. How big is this problem and how does it affect the payments industry?
As consumers and businesses transition their banking activities to the online and mobile channels, it becomes more difficult to verify customers through these faceless channels, thus leading to a rise in fraud cases. In fact, financial service providers reported fraud rates up to eight times higher in their digital channels compared to the branch. In recent years, fraudulent digital financial transactions amounted to EUR 1.8 billion annually in Europe. In the UK, digital payments and remote banking (internet, telephone, and mobile banking) fraud totalled GBP 152.9 million in 2018.
For financial service providers, fraud has increased dramatically in recent years, specifically in cybercrime, identity theft (data breaches), and synthetic identity fraud. The rise of synthetic identity fraud is costing the financial industry considerably: the billions of consumer data records* that were exposed in data breaches the past years are in the hands of criminals and present them with unique data to transfer money using stolen, spoofed or fake identities. Consequently, simply assessing personally identifiable data (e.g. login details, e-mail, address) is no longer sufficient to prevent fraud. It’s critical to verify the unique data associated with a customer’s (digital) identity.
To combat the rise in fraud, financial service providers implement digital Know-Your-Customer (KYC) programs**. Digital customer identification is paramount for remote customer onboarding and also for identity proofing and financial transaction monitoring. To ensure a smooth digital process, banks and other financial service providers start using biometric technologies for the remote identification of their customers, supporting, for example, selfie-based identification. As organisations adopt digital transformation and biometric technology, thorough ID document verification remains imperative. Unfortunately, biometric checks sometimes fail to meet legal requirements or security standards. In these situations, thorough ID document verification offers the most reliable solution for establishing a customer’s true identity. At Keesing we believe that an accurate and reliable ID verification process consists of a combination of biometric checks and thorough ID document verification. Each customer’s ID document can be cross-checked against Documentchecker; our comprehensive ID reference database that covers more ID documents than any other database in the world. With AuthentiScan Keesing provides an unparalleled balance between remote, biometric identity proofing with trusted ID document verification.
Narrowing down the topic to personal ID, how can a document authentication and verification processes prevent counterfeiting of documents and reduce instances of identity fraud?
Much like a car thief will choose to steal a car without an alarm, a fraudster will be deterred from using a financial institution that has an effective ID verification process in place. While these processes certainly protect against ID fraud, no system can offer a 100% guarantee.
With AuthentiScan, however, we offer our customers ID verification technology of the highest quality. This technology builds on almost a century of expertise that is reflected in the ID reference database powering our solution. With the unique combination of cutting-edge biometric technology and our trusted ID verification we offer customer identification that is accurate and reliable.
How do companies like Keesing Technologies enable businesses to achieve regulatory compliance while streamlining their customers’ onboarding journey?
The AuthentiScan web API offers a seamless identity-proofing system that enables businesses to onboard new customers remotely and achieve regulatory compliance while streamlining their customers’ onboarding journey. In the web API, Keesing combines its trusted ID document verification with biometric facial recognition and liveness detection functionalities, guaranteeing an extremely secure customer identification process.
AuthentiScan guides the customer through the process of taking a photo of their ID document and a selfie for facial comparison with the photo on the ID document. To ensure biological identifiers are from the proper user and not from someone else, liveness detection takes place through eye (blinking) and lip movement (smiling) analysis. The addition of liveness detection to the process bolsters security by making it extremely difficult to impersonate the individual whose photo appears on an ID document. The ID document is then rigorously verified against Keesing’s ID reference database, which contains information on more than 6,000 ID documents from over 200 countries. This process provides ID document verification that can be trusted. AuthentiScan also includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) autofill functionality to speed up the enrolment process for both the business and customer, instantly boosting efficiency and providing a convenient onboarding experience. AuthentiScan meets all Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance mandates and creates a compliance report for each onboarded customer.
Education and collaboration are used by fraud teams as important tools to fight counterfeit documents. How can technology companies assist them in this matter?
Keesing Technologies has been around for almost a century, allowing us to build an extensive network and in-depth knowledge of ID verification and authentication. This knowledge is used in the development of our new technologies and products, as well as by the document experts at our Helpdesk. Our document experts use our large global network to stay up to date on the latest developments and releases of ID documents. We share our knowledge and expertise with regard to ID documents and fraud (prevention) via training courses, lectures, and workshops worldwide provided by document experts from the Keesing ID Academy. Through the ID Academy and our ID verification solutions we build on our mission to help organisations prevent and combat ID fraud on a global scale.
*More than 14.7 billion consumer data records were exposed in data breaches from 2013 (KPMG Global Banking Fraud Survey)
**85% of financial service providers have implemented digital Know-Your-Customer (KYC) programs (EY Global Banking Outlook)
The interview was first published in the Digital Onboarding and KYC Report 2020, which offers insightful editorials on topics such as digital onboarding best practices and key challenges, financial crime and how to fight it, crypto, and more.
About Daniel Suess
Daniel Suess, MBA International Business at EUBS and Commercial Director at Keesing Technologies, helped the company to successfully transform from a database publisher into a software service provider in the identity verification space. Daniel guided his team in the successful onboarding of many international governmental and commercial clients for Keesing’s cloud based and on-premise identity verification solutions.
About Keesing Technologies
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