How Lightico’s Advanced Digital ID Verification Promotes Seamless Compliance

The ability to verify your customers’ identities remotely has never been more important. Requiring face-to-face or cumbersome processes hurts the customer experience, leading to frustration and in some cases even abandonment of the transaction. Lightico now offers a full range of digital identity verification capabilities to ensure that your customers are verified at the highest level of security without compromising on user experience.

Why Is Authenticating Customers So Important?

There are several interconnected reasons why companies today are required to authenticate customers and verify their ID beyond the shadow of a doubt. Growing KYC and AML demands from governmental bodies are leading companies to take more serious steps to both remain compliant and protect customers. In addition, there are bad actors out there who are using COVID-19 to their advantage. They are scamming people into donating money to fake organizations or to provide personal information. With regulations constantly evolving and changing, and fraudsters adapting their tactics just as quickly, it’s important to ensure that you can authenticate customers remotely, easily, and securely—without negatively impacting the customer experience. Here are some instances when verifying ID is most critical:

• When a bank customer would like to open a new account, or register for a new service, they will be asked to provide personal information and share a photo ID.
• When a telco customer would like to purchase a prepaid line or a SIM, they must supply a valid photo ID of the purchase, usually to comply with homeland security laws.
• When sharing medical information with customers, organizations must validate the identity of the customer before sharing the document.

Challenges: Today’s Methods Deliver Subpar Results

Typically, authenticating ID requires comparing an ID card and other official documents to external databases. But the problem with many traditional and commonly used identity verification methods is that they can be

• Easy for fraudsters to manipulate: By using social engineering, fraudsters can gather personal information about a legitimate customer. in addition, less experienced agents can be manipulated by fraudsters who say they are in a hurry, lost their wallet, are stuck in an airport and must have the agent’s assistance and good will to continue without authenticating themselves. This is of course poses a substantial risk.
• Slow: Some companies go in the opposite direction by adding many layers of security that lead to cumbersome processes for the customer. For example, asking the customer to physically come to a bank branch to prove their identity, or asking questions about information that the customer doesn’t have handy (such as the amount of the last purchase in the local store), which in turn can
• Damaging to the customer experience: A slow, cumbersome customer experience often leads to frustration, drop-offs, and abandonment. Lightico’s research has found that 31% of customers abandon applications due to cumbersome ID verification processes.

Instantly Verify Customers, Wherever They Are

With Lightico’s new advanced identity verification capabilities, you can protect your customers and your organization from fraud and compliance breaches by enabling a frictionless KYC experience and customer authentication without slowing sales and service cycles. Using supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, a large variety of government-issued photo IDs are supported. The customer is requested to capture the front and back of the photo ID, and a selfie photo. Using image processing, the system authenticates the identity document by processing the visible security features, type of the identity document, the spacing of fonts and expected values, encoded security features (such as machine readable zone or PDF417 barcode extraction and comparison to the visually inspected zone). In addition, the document’s physical attributes such as document edges, portrait color, positioning, and integration are all processed and inspected. Together with validating the document authenticity, a biometric verification takes place through selfie comparison to the identity document picture. Unstructured data placed on the document such as first name, last name, address, date of birth, document expiration date, and document ID is extracted using the Optical Character Recognition algorithm (OCR). The extracted data can be inserted directly into a document, reducing errors and time to handle, and promoting a seamless customer experience.

The Many Benefits of Advanced ID Verification

As we have seen, Lightico’s new and improved way of authenticating customers is streamlined within the customer journey. The authentication is done remotely in a fast and instant way using only the digital channel the customer used to initiate the transaction session. This ensures an exceptional customer experience without compromising compliance and security needs. All this is followed by a faster turnaround time, reduction of fraud instances, lower abandonment rates, and higher NPS.