New Zealand
A raft of legal opinions has cleared the way for greater use of facial recognition technology to prove who you are online, as the Government moves towards setting up a common identity verification service.
Major agencies are trying to find a “fundamentally different” approach they say will make your online identity easier to prove, more secure – and much, much more useful.
The activation of new technology is expected within the next year.
A Cabinet committee paper in June 2021 said legal barriers had been expected to face the new technology – but it has since been built to let a facial recognition tool run by Internal Affairs search the driver licence photo database.
Five legal opinions said no law change was needed.
Internal Affairs now says its tool, Identity Check (formerly called One Time Identity), could become the common service used to verify online the identity of anyone opting in to access services like banking, benefits, health checks and student records.
Global
The facial recognition market is set to reach $20.5 billion by 2031.
Businesses in the BFSI, retail, and education are increasingly adopting facial recognition for boosting customer experience, generating massive lucrative opportunities, notes the study by TMR on the facial recognition market. The market is projected to advance at CAGR of 16.8 percent from 2022 to 2031.
United States
San Francisco-based Digital ID card network Unum ID has raised $2 million in funding to ramp up growth of its reusable identities.
The funding round was led by 1414 Ventures and Outliers, with participation from Draper Associates, TappanHill Ventures and more.
The company uses a patent pending technology and a web-based wallet, and says it can slash onboarding time from minutes to seconds.
Unum ID also raised $2 million just over two years ago, and is now over $5 million in total funds raised.
United States
Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Resecurity has announced its new AI-powered Digital Identity Protection solution designed to “monitor, inform, and protect individuals and businesses from data and identity theft.” The solution uses billions of data points from the dark web and connects victims, fostering information exchange on potential indicators of compromise or data breach.
Identity theft is the fastest-growing financial crime, with 10 million Americans falling victim to identity theft each year. The global identity theft protection services market projected to grow from $11.39 billion in 2022 to $27.90 billion by 2029.
Brazil
Brazil-based identity verification and digital onboarding solutions provider Combate à Fraude (CAF) has hired new CEO Darryl Green, co-founder of Ethoca, with the responsibility to steer the company’s market expansion plans.
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Combate à Fraude, founded in 2019, provides AI-based identity verification and digital onboarding solutions to businesses including banks, retailers, fintechs, and other companies. Its system also verifies document authenticity, and uses facial recognition for identity verification.
In his role, Green will “work to enhance the digital customer onboarding experience, improve back office efficiency and help companies reduce losses incurred from identity fraud.”
Ireland
Cork-based startup Valid8me has announced a capital injection of €12.5 million to expand into the UK and Europe. The Irish startup has developed a SaaS platform that is transforming customer onboarding, making the processes more streamlined and secure.
Valid8me’s SaaS platform allows both individuals and corporations to securely store, share and manage their key Know-Your-Customer-related data. It has championed the use of reusable digital identity, which helps businesses streamline proof of identity and onboarding processes with simplicity, certainty and control.
United States
There has been a 297 percent surge in breaches caused primarily by security issues associated with supply chain and third-party suppliers according to a new survey by ForgeRock. This represents almost 25 percent of all breaches. The report also found unauthorised access was the leading cause of breaches for the fourth consecutive year, steadily increasing to account for 50 percent of all records compromised during 2021.
ForgeRock also discovered that 60 percent of all records breached in 2021 included either Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, or both – nearly doubling since last year. The report found that as ecommerce sites and applications increasingly strive for an effortless user experience to differentiate from the competition, they often omit security features. When massive amounts of personal data are poorly protected, this leads to creating the perfect conditions for breaches and subsequent fraud.
Global
Google has begun rolling out a multipurpose digital wallet that enables users to store, use and present digital credentials such as identity cards and health passes as well as payment cards, transit and event tickets and hotel keys in 39 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Google announced the new Wallet in May and has now begun rolling it out as an update replacing Google Pay in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, UAE and the UK.
Google is also launching Wallet in the USA and Singapore but Android users in both countries will also still be able to use Google Pay for peer-to-peer payments and money management.
A rollout in Japan is also “coming soon”, according to Google.
India
M2P Fintech, Asia’s largest API infrastructure company announced that it has acquired digital identity firm Syntizen Technologies. M2P Fintech provides API infrastructure which enables businesses to embed financial products. Presently, it is working with more than 500 fintech, banks, and other financial institutions.
Syntizen Technologies is a Hyderabad-based SaaS company founded in 2014. It offers products like Aadhaar e-KYC, Video KYC, Aadhaar Masking, etc. like Facial Liveness & Facial Matching.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is launching the nation’s first Foundational ID project, providing national IDs equipped with biometrics to residents.
The East African nation plans to ease the issuance of digital IDs; minimize the reliance on smart cards, ease of distribution and usage of new IDs; and provide authentication for both online and offline scenarios. The Ethiopian government selected TECH5’s T5-ABIS BE (Biometric Engine) for face, fingerprint and iris modalities for biometric identification, de-duplication and enrollment, as well as T5-Digital ID for issuance and authentication of foundational IDs in Ethiopia.
