Onfido Face Authenticate enables businesses to authenticate customers’ real identities

Onfido announced Onfido Face Authenticate, which adds a fast and seamless biometric face authenticator as well as new security tools, including Onfido Private Key Encryption, to its Real Identity Platform.

The new product suite provides businesses with the high levels of assurance they need to prove their customers are who they say they are in a remote setting without compromising user experience or privacy.

With Onfido’s Real Identity Platform, comprising of Onfido Verify (document and facial biometric onboarding) and Onfido Face Authenticate (biometric face authentication), companies can now go beyond safely onboarding new users for Know Your Customer (KYC) or compliance purposes by providing a safe and frictionless way for trusted users to re-access existing accounts within seconds and unlock new revenue opportunities for digital products and services.

“Identity fraud losses cost $56B last year as more businesses adopted a digital-first approach to customer onboarding, providing a larger landscape for fraudsters to attack,” said Alex Valle, Chief Product Officer at Onfido. “Onfido Face Authenticate, in tandem with our verification product, provides a more robust identity lifecycle solution for businesses, ensuring the people accessing online accounts are the same legitimate people who were verified at registration, without compromising user experience or privacy.”

Fast, frictionless and secure authentication across the user journey

Onfido Face Authenticate leverages class-leading, 3D Face Liveness Detection AI during user authentication. Compatible with billions of iOS and Android devices, tablets and PCs, users simply take a three-second video selfie. Onfido then recreates the 3D shape of the user’s face and matches it to the biometric data provided when their real identity was established at registration, enabling repeat access at high-risk or high-value moments.

These include:

• Self-service account recovery: a simple video selfie can be used to recover locked accounts after repeated failed attempts by genuine users. Up to 50% of help-desk calls are for password resets which can be costly for businesses and frustrating to users. A recent consumer survey revealed that 58% of consumers would prefer to use a biometric in place of a password.
• New product enrollment: quickly authenticate an existing customer’s identity to allow them to more seamlessly apply for additional financial products or services. For example, a bank customer applying for a mortgage or loan.
• Authorizing high-value transactions: For example, transferring large sums of money or purchasing a high-value item through an online store.
• Remote access: unlocking rental cars or hotel rooms with only your face; provides fast, secure access to high-value assets or high-risk places with no human supervision.
• Authenticating gig workers: confirming a person who originally registered for employment is still the same trusted driver or delivery worker carrying out a task.

Unlike impersonal, inefficient, and phishable approaches like One-Time Passwords (OTP) that can lead to friction, frustration, high associated costs and security concerns, Onfido’s smart, device-agnostic technology puts customer experience at the center, while providing the most innovative anti-spoofing technology currently available.

Onfido Face Authenticate ensures that trusted users are live in-person during every authentication session. The system can even operate in low-light conditions by modulating the screen brightness of the device. Onfido Face Authenticate leverages FaceTec’s 3D FaceMap technology to achieve a class-leading False Acceptance Rate (FAR) of less than 1/12.8M (for face matching) and is NIST/NVLAP PAD Level 1 & 2 certified.

“We are excited to start using the new Onfido Face Authenticate product to see how it will help us to continue providing all Luno customers with an account recovery experience that is simple and fast while maintaining the highest level of security,” said Ian Rossiter, Senior Product Manager at Luno.

“Our strategic partnership with Onfido is critical to ensure that people are riding Voi scooters appropriately. We’re looking forward to taking this fast and simple process one step further to guarantee the legitimate account owner is the one making a journey,” said Fredrik Hjelm, Co-founder and CEO of Voi Technology.

Privacy protection

Onfido’s enterprise tools provide a set of complementary technologies to its verification and authentication technologies, aimed at adding additional protections for customer data for enterprise organizations. The tools include Onfido Private Key Encryption (PKE) and customer dashboards, enabling audit logs and user roles which give businesses more control and accountability.

Onfido’s PKE solution builds on its existing enterprise-grade security standards (including SOC 2 Type II compliance and ISO 27001 certification), offering enterprise businesses and banks the highest level of security required to protect and safeguard the privacy of their customers.

Businesses can now encrypt their customers’ personal data with a dedicated and unique Customer Master Key (CMK) using the AES-256 standard, one of the most secure encryption protocols. Onfido’s PKE solution provides an added layer on top of its global encryption that stores sensitive customer information as cipher text. If the CMK is ever revoked, the data becomes inaccessible to anyone.

“When you are supporting 350 million payment transactions per year for more than 20 million end-users across 2,500 different platforms, it’s critical to ensure customer data is safeguarded to the fullest extent. Through its private key offering, Onfido will provide us with more enhanced controls around data management delivering peace of mind as we conduct our day-to-day business,” said Céline Bayer, Deputy CTO at MANGOPAY.

Onfido’s suite of identity verification products benefits from pre-built integrations with all the major Identity and Access Management providers, such as Okta, Auth0, ForgeRock and Salesforce.

Onfido Face Authenticate and enterprise tools are available now.