Speed Is Important in Identity Validation

As a culture, we have a mixed relationship with speed.

On the one hand, slow is considered careful. For instance, we are required to drive slowly when road work is happening, and we are told to take “baby steps” when we are doing something new. When we are learning or researching, we might take our time to consider a variety of sources so that we can make the right decisions.

Yet, we tend to want things quickly. Is the line moving fast enough? When will we be seated? Why is that car moving so slowly? We might even honk at the person in front of us the minute the light turns green. We want to be at the end quickly.

The same goes for transaction processes.

If you are running an identity validation process, you want to ensure that the person you are working with is who they say they are and not a fraudster. The initial thinking is “I need to take my time to ensure that the person opening the account, applying for the loan, or making the high-value purchase is who they say they are.” But, knowing how impatient we are, you feel the need to speed things up. In that thought process, you might think this means that you need to be less rigorous and let more fraudsters through. The alternative is “I get fewer good customers if I make them wait.” Obviously, this is not a great tradeoff.

But that speed concern is based on a technology assumption.

In the identity validation world, the assumption is that friction or rigor slows things down. Manual identity document validation can be slow. Depending on the business, you can get hundreds of ID types, including military IDs and commercial, non-commercial, taxi, livery, and motorcycle licenses for any one of 50+ U.S. states and territories. If you are doing this manually, you likely need a book to guide you through the slow process. Getting it right more times than not is too much for the human eye even when you don’t think about how good fakes have become. Identity validation technology steps in to improve on accuracy, but it doesn’t always hit the speed mark.

The most common approach is templating that basically mimics the human eye. The computer figures out which type of license it is and then makes sure that all the proper marks and fields are present and in the right places. It then uses optical character recognition to extract info from the fields and compares the extracted information to what it finds in third-party databases. In essence, it is looking to determine whether each of the fields is valid. Then, it looks to see whether the fields belong together in an effort to catch synthetic IDs, or IDs made from disparate pieces of information from real IDs.

At this point, we are at the 5- to 10-second mark. The customer is already impatient and likely looking to reload their web browser. A decision (real or fake) can be rendered only 60% of the time. In the 40% of cases when it is not known whether the ID is real or fake, additional processes such as manual review are brought in. At this point, the customer is likely going to have to wait until the next day for the result, and the company may lose their prospect.

The speed issue, though, is related to this technology and process. What if the customer didn’t need to photograph the front and back of the license and slowly upload the results? What if the company didn’t have to extract the information from the photo and analyze it using a variety of third-party solutions, adding additional steps and time to the process? What if you could understand if an ID is real or fake in fewer steps and with less time?

There is another way.

Intellicheck can validate a license in under a second using just the barcode on the back. No photos have to be uploaded, and no third-party data sources are needed. If you want to use optical character recognition to preload a form or match the information on the front of the license to what is in the barcode, we can do that. We can even use machine learning to determine a risk score to provide greater trust even if the ID is real. But the key to what we do is that there is no speed and security tradeoff. We provide the best experience without the risk you’ll see with other solutions.

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