Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash
Identity verification confirms that a person is genuinely who they say they are, playing a key role in ensuring secure interactions across various industries. With remote transactions and interactions becoming commonplace, this process helps safeguard sensitive information, granting access only to authorized individuals.
It is particularly vital in finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, with significant identity theft and fraud risks. Additionally, and e-commerce, with significant identity theft and fraud risks. Additionally, it supports compliance with regulatory standards, making it an essential tool for enhancing security and trust in digital operations.
Collecting Identity Information
The first step in developing an identity verification system involves implementing a secure method for gathering customer identity data. This critical process forms the system's foundation and directly impacts its accuracy, security, and overall reliability.
Data collection can be approached in two main ways. One option involves asking users to provide photos or scans of their identification documents. Alternatively, the system can include specialized components within the application to enable real-time data capture, ensuring a seamless and efficient process. Both methods focus on creating a secure and dependable structure for the verification process.
Implementing Secure Backend Processing
A significant challenge is the inability to trust verification results obtained on a user's device. Since these devices are beyond your direct control, verification results can be easily tampered with, jeopardizing the entire process.
Ensure the secure data transfer from the user's device to your backend for processing. This task is complex, as it involves safeguarding data during transit to prevent interception. Additionally, you must consider different verification scenarios for various ID document types: those with electronic chips and those without.
The entire verification process, including chip data verification and re-verification, is managed for electronic documents (eMRTD) like passports and ID cards with embedded RFID chips. Backend processing becomes more complex without a chip, with dynamic document protection and liveness checks playing a vital role. Get an ID scanner to perform these checks, ensuring the ID document is physically present and hasn't been tampered with.
Managing Updates for Newly Issued IDs
Identity documents like driver's licenses and passports are frequently enhanced with new security features to outpace counterfeiters. However, this also presents the challenge of keeping your system current.
To tackle this, set up a process to routinely update your system with the latest information on new IDs and identify the newest security features. In this field, a DIY approach is rarely feasible. Typically, this process requires collaboration with government agencies or third-party organizations that can supply the necessary updates and insights.
Modifying and Optimizing the System
Creating an internal identity verification system is not a one-and-done task. It demands consistent oversight and ongoing enhancements to remain reliable and secure. One of the most complex aspects of this process involves defining thresholds and fine-tuning decision models used to classify verification results. Typically, the outcomes fall into three main categories:
- Fake: Critical checks fail, leaving little value in further manual verification.
- Authentic: All checks are satisfied, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
- Uncertain: Cases where there isn't enough confidence to determine if the result is authentic or fake, requiring manual review.
An effective IDV system should equip you with tools to handle these scenarios. This might include an operator panel where ambiguous cases are flagged for manual inspection, enabling you to make this process more efficient.
Endnote
They say if you want to go fast, go alone, but this approach falls short regarding identity verification. Such a critical process demands specialized skills and in-depth knowledge in document forensics and biometric analysis. That's why partnering with an experienced expert who truly understands the complexities of this field is essential for achieving success.
