Global payments solution provider, Checkout.com, has launched ‘Identity Verification’, a new product to improve the customer onboarding and ID verification process. 

Checkout.com trained the product on billions of identity and facial recognition documents – with the new launch also leveraging proprietary artificial intelligence (AI). The Identity Verification offering was released for the likes of fintechs, rental and hiring companies, gaming, and government organisations, to help them tackle ID fraud.

Identity Verification helps businesses scale by having a friction-free, compliant, and quick customer verification process.

Developed on an expansive list of ID documents across 195 countries, Identity Verification could potentially verify nearly every citizen in the world; Checkout.com has claimed. In its beta alone, it verified over 10 million identities and identified over one million fraudulent identities.

Baptiste Foulon, senior operations manager at Uber Eats, discussed how the product could enhance its own service. He said: “We’re delighted to be working with the Checkout.com Identity Verification teams to take full advantage of their expertise so that we can guarantee the authenticity of every document provided and the best delivery experience for all independent delivery drivers using the Uber Eats app.”

Tackling deepfakes

Identity fraud continues to both grow and evolve. Deep fakes and deceptive documents have grown in sophistication in particular – but Checkout.com’s newest offering aims to tackle this.

Using video mode on a mobile phone, customers now show an identity document and their face while the sophisticated AI guides users throughout the process, providing live feedback on how to show document authenticity and move their face so the AI can recognise them to combat fraud. Identity Verification will also tell users if the document they are scanning is invalid.

Meron Colbeci, chief product officer at Checkout.com, explained: “We deeply believe in the intersection between digital payments and online identity verification. Legacy systems requiring an appointment with a human being or limited to certain days a week are not conducive to the long-term growth of the digital economy.

“By utilising AI and algorithms trained on billions of data points alongside a video stream that simply requires an internet connection, we can now verify identity documents to facilitate customer onboarding and comply with KYC requirements quickly and accurately.”

AI and machine learning play a significant role in how Identity Verification authenticates identity documents.The product’s AI can verify authentic identities across over 3000 identity documents. By moving the identity document on the video, the AI can monitor hologram and colour changes common in most documents, as well as transparency and opacity. With the user doing a series of short and easy face movements, the AI can quickly identify possible deep fakes or fraudulent identity documents.