Sumsub has announced two initiatives in Singapore that connect national digital identity, commercial onboarding, and academic research on deepfake defenses. At its inaugural What The Fraud Summit in Singapore, the company introduced Singpass integration services as part of its Non-Doc Identity Verification product and signed a Research Collaboration Agreement with Nanyang Technological University to work on watermarking techniques for personal images. Sumsub positions the moves as support for Singapore’s Smart Nation 2.0 priorities around digital trust and innovation.
On the product side, Sumsub will act as an aggregator to help its clients integrate with Singpass, Singapore’s national digital identity platform. Businesses that are registered in Singapore with a valid UEN and that receive Singpass approval can use Sumsub to authenticate citizens and residents through “Login with Singpass” flows instead of asking users to upload identity documents. The integration relies on Singpass Myinfo and other government-backed datasets to provide regulator-approved access to verified identity and address information, with processes aligned to Monetary Authority of Singapore AML and CFT obligations and the Personal Data Protection Act.
For end users, the experience is framed as a faster, document-free onboarding path. Users scan a QR code and authenticate in the Singpass app using either biometrics or a six-digit passcode, then consent to share verified personal data from government systems. Sumsub says this approach can reduce average verification times from roughly thirty seconds to about 4.5 seconds and deliver up to a 53 percent reduction in processing time and a 35 percent improvement in customer pass rates. Singpass itself already serves more than five million residents across over 2,700 government and private services, so leveraging it for commercial onboarding is intended to tap into an established trust anchor.
The second initiative focuses on deepfake resilience. Under Sumsub’s AI Academic Program, the company and NTU Singapore have agreed to collaborate on research into human-imperceptible watermarks for personal images. The goal is to embed signals into photos that make them harder to repurpose in deepfake or face-swap attacks, particularly in social media contexts where users routinely share images that can be scraped by fraudsters. Sumsub points to internal data showing a 158 percent year-on-year increase in deepfake fraud in Singapore in 2025, and NTU’s Digital Trust Centre frames the work as part of broader efforts to maintain trust as generative image and video tools become more accessible.
For CISOs and fraud leaders, the announcement highlights two converging trends. First, it illustrates how government-backed digital identity systems such as Singpass are being pulled directly into commercial KYC and onboarding workflows, offering better data assurance but also concentrating dependency on national platforms and their governance. Second, it shows how vendors are beginning to sponsor upstream controls against deepfake misuse, not just downstream detection. If watermarking approaches prove robust in real-world environments, they could eventually complement liveness checks and biometric verification as part of a layered defense against synthetic identity attacks.
Sources: PR Newswire, Sumsub, Tech EDT
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
