ID-Pal
Nominated Award:
Best Application of AI in an SME
Website of Company (or Linkedin profile of Person):
https://www.id-pal.com/
ID-Pal offers a GDPR-compliant identity and address verification solution out-of-the-box. Since 2016, ID-Pal’s vision and strategy has remained consistent with its guiding principles of delivering a simple, secure and convenient identity verification solution to enable companies to validate documents, verify document holders and check addresses in real-time.
ID-Pal eliminates the complexity, cost, timelines, and risk associated with regulatory compliance by delivering an identity verification solution that is simple to use, easy to integrate and instantly customisable to the specific needs of any business. The ID-Pal platform enables businesses to verify their customers’ identity across any channel or jurisdiction. The ID-Pal solution takes the cost, risk, and frustration out of the customer onboarding process. We’ve packaged best-of-breed technologies with a seamless user experience to create an end-to-end solution that can be configured, branded, and integrated into a business’ processes with minimal or no technical effort required. Anti-money laundering regulations require many businesses to verify the identity of its customers prior to engaging in any commercial activities. This process can be frustrating for the customer, resulting in customer drop-off and significant lost revenues for businesses.
The requirements to be 6AMLD and GDPR compliant, the need to offer a friction-free journey for customers globally along with the ability to integrate with existing processes make it critical that professionals across financial services have access to a solution that addresses all these areas. ID-Pal distributes its offering to SME’s, banks, financial institutions, and businesses across 30 sectors around the world via its channel partners that include KYC Global, Fenergo, Experian, Vesta, HID Global, Salesforce and others, whilst servicing the SMB financial services market directly. The rise of the solopreneur and small business FinTech’s means ID-Pal is part of the next generation of companies to provide integrated, vertical software for individuals going solo.
ID-Pal has established strategic solution partnerships with leading specialists (as listed below) to develop a highly agile and flexible verification layer and ultimately offer the lowest cost of ownership to our customers:
Biometrics
Artificial Intelligence
Optical Character Recognition
Verifiable Data Sources
ID-Pal was founded by industry practitioners who grew frustrated with the barrier that identity verification was creating in terms of doing business with clients, as well as the lack of solutions available for professional SME firms and Mid-Tier enterprises. The ever-increasing burden of regulatory compliance, coupled with the shift towards digitisation of the customer onboarding experience makes it imperative that businesses have a solution in place if they want to remain competitive. Their wealth of experience, combined with our complementary skillsets, product insight and relentless focus on execution makes our team the best fit for this market opportunity.
We enable businesses to access a world-class solution so they can focus on their core business. ID-Pal’s solution includes multi-layered verification that ensures rigorous and robust compliance. Businesses protect their integrity and reputation with customers. ID-Pal has integrated multiple industry-leading technologies into one end-to-end solution.
Reason for Nomination:
Problem Solving
According to a HID global report, European financial institutions are losing almost 40% of applicants during digital onboarding. As part of a digital onboarding flow, Address E-verification is removing the need for an additional address document submission therefore making the onboarding process faster and removing a step completely. Further to this is the speed and efficiency of onboarding with the ID-Pal solution reducing overall pressure on business resources needed to verify and support customers. Often these processes are: • Manual
• Repetitive
• Resource-heavy
• At risk of fraud due to human involvement
Fraud is detected and prevented sooner by allowing biometrics and AI to verify identity and address documents along with automatically producing a Due Diligence Report to accompany the submission for compliance obligations. Authorities are notified of fraudulent behaviour leading to better understanding of the latest fraud tactics and applying new solutions to stop these efforts in technology like ID-Pal. Keeping individuals’ Personally identifiable information (PII) out of the reach of criminal forces.
Strategic Advantage
We possess a very potent strategic advantage in this space in the form of: Strategic channel partnerships that we have nurtured and developed over years both in terms of product integration and business alignment and remain unique levers for our growth and expansion. Address E-Verification provides stronger fraud protection for a business, but the customer journey becomes even simpler as they no longer need to submit a Proof of Address document.
Optimising the ID&V Process
Businesses struggle to balance robust compliance with a convenient user experience, resulting in lost revenues from customer drop-off, increased costs for the back office and heightened exposure to fraud. From a business perspective, businesses are losing money and fraudsters are stealing money. ID-Pal’s KYC solution will protect businesses from money laundering activities and ensure that they can set up and maintain relationships with trustworthycustomers.
Manual reviews and human intervention in the identity verification process adds risk, stress and additional time and cost to a business. This can lead to inaccurate assessment or judgement calls, based on outdated document or databases that an individual has access too. Using an innovation like Address E-Verification as part of a multi-layered solution relieves employees of otherwise manual, time-consuming processes to return to more meaningful work. Businesses can onboard customers anytime, anywhere seamlessly in a matter of seconds.
From the customer’s perspective: The customer onboarding process is typically very frustrating for customers and results in an average drop off rate of 49%. This hinders customers from opening accounts and accessing services that they need. For the vast majority of customers, the entire identity verification process takes less than 60 seconds to complete using the mobile app. In the portal every customer submission is thoroughly verified and authenticated using a suite of industry-leading biometric, document and database checks. The ID-Pal platform provides market-leading accuracy in verification outcomes. This means customers benefit from significantly reduced application processing time and significantly quicker responses.
Advanced Technology
ID-Pal incorporates advanced technologies into a highly flexible and agile orchestration layer that also includes all the supporting hardware, infrastructure, decisioning logic and technical controls needed to robustly scale.
The standard methods of identity verification are often called:
Standard “1+1” – Where an individual’s name and one piece of identifiable information (Address or Date of Birth) is verified against 1 database/data point.
Standard “2+2” – Where an individual’s Name and two pieces of identifiable information (Address & Date of Birth) are verified against 2 separate databases/data points.
However, ID-Pal provides a deeper level of verification by combining both methods and validating the result against the end customer using industry-leading biometric analysis. The journey is still seamless for the customer, but the business benefits from stronger, multi-layered verification of an individual’s identity.
The ID-Pal solution uses advanced mobile technologies in the portal so that the ID&V submission is thoroughly verified and authenticated using a suite of industry-leading technologies that include:
Liveness Check: Motion detection, light and shade analysis and facial gesture recognition checks are performed to ensure that the person making the submission is a real-life person as opposed to a photo of a person.
Facial Comparison: 50-point biometric profile is then captured and compared to the person on the identity document to perform a facial comparison check.
Document Verification: Up to 70-point check is performed, including machine readable zone check, photo substitution, pixilation, pattern continuity and a suite of other algorithmic checks to ensure that the identity document hasn’t been tampered with or forged in any way.
Database checks: Database checks are performed as an additional layer of identity and address verification.
Trust
Maintaining a reputation of compliance excellence with regulatory bodies like the Central Bank of Ireland alongside certifications in iBeta Liveness testing and ISO 27001 certification gives peace-of-mind that integration with our platform is a trusted secure process. This allows wealth managers and compliance teams the capacity to focus on high-risk submissions and allocate more time to preventing fraud and identifying instances of fraud.
Therefore, ID-Pal has been selected by industry leaders such as Zurich, Lerex Technologies, One4All, Elavon, 123Signed, Global Shares and AIB Merchant services. For the customers of these companies, the ID-Pal platform provides a customer-facing experience that is as simple and intuitive as possible.
Challenges & Results
One of the main challenges is delivering a solution to our customers that is easy to use, quick to set up and offer minimal business disruption. Most businesses need to balance remote identity verification with robust compliance and a seamless user experience that is intuitive for the customer. ID-Pal’s ‘plug and play’ capabilities mean it doesn’t interfere with other customer operational systems or back-office processes/software.
Furthermore, the identity industry is a highly dynamic space where a method of verification one day can be superseded overnight by the next generation of its kind. For example, biometrics checks like Liveness Detection pose a significant risk to FinTechs focusing on developing their own specialised proprietary technology especially if the market changes.
Additional Information:
ID-Pal is the only SaaS offering for ID&V on the market. Most other vendors provide either a complex API / SDK integration or a web app solution. Whilst there are advantages and disadvantages associated with both offerings, ID-Pal has taken only the strengths of each method and combined them into the most flexible ID&V solution available. Complex API/SDK Integrations typically provide access to technical checks but don’t include:
Supporting Technical Architecture
Supporting Hardware
User Interface / User Experience
Workflows with Business Logic
These suppliers provide the building blocks that are needed to make up an Identity Verification solution. However, they leave the actual designing, building and integrating of the solution up to the business. Implementing these API / SDK solutions typically incur significant overhead costs as well as time commitment and risk. Whilst web app solutions can be implemented quickly, they can be more susceptible to issues with capture quality, security and user experience. ID-Pal’s SaaS offering takes the strengths of each of the above solution types, and combines them into a complete, end-to-end solution that can be branded and configured within minutes and fully integrated within a day.
Trust & Security
Focusing our resources to best support the needs of clients via our latest innovation Address E-Verification while maintaining a relationship of trust and security with strategic partners has granted us the ability to exceed expectations of target customers across key industries. Maintaining a reputation of compliance excellence with regulatory bodies like the Central Bank of Ireland alongside certifications in iBeta Liveness testing and ISO 27001 certification gives peace-of-mind that integration with our platform is a trusted secure process. So, our customers have the capacity to focus on high-risk submissions and allocate more time to preventing fraud and identifying instances of fraud.
Growth Strategy
ID-Pal’s core growth strategy is to scale across industry verticals and geographies through the formation and development of strategic partnerships.
We have a successful marketing strategy in place that targets mid-cap and enterprise level companies in key markets. The cost of customer acquisition is kept low by leveraging mainly digital channels. We also use referral promotional schemes and distribution partnerships. Our coherent digital strategy is tailored to each step of the customer journey—from attracting visitors to our website, to educating them of the benefits the solution could provide to their business and converting them into leads for the Sales team.
The qualified leads generated through the marketing campaigns are funnelled to the Sales team who are responsible for converting these leads into customers. Our Sales team also engages larger, higher value customers directly and develop a highly nurtured relationship through the Pre-Integration Questionnaire.
Following a comprehensive market assessment, ID-Pal engages a flag ship customer to validate our value proposition, further develop our solution to meet the needs of that market and create a success story to support wider roll-out. Finally, ID-Pal engages with a strategic partner to accelerate and scale market penetration by leveraging their existing network of customers in that space.
