Envoc, the Baton Rouge software company that created Louisiana’s LA Wallet digital driver’s license app, divested its ownership and operation of the app in December 2025 and has shifted its identity work to FaceLock, a liveness-based platform for credentials bound to their holders’ faces.
Founder and CEO Calvin Fabre discussed the transition with hosts Tony Bitzionis and Alex Perala on the latest episode of the ID Talk podcast, “‘Liveness Is Gonna Be the New Hotness’: Envoc’s Calvin Fabre on Life After LA Wallet.”
Envoc launched the app at Louisiana’s request in 2018, before the ISO mobile driver’s license standard was released, Fabre said. State law let police accept an on-screen version of the license from the start, and the app grew to more than 2 million users. After the ISO/IEC 18013-5 standard arrived, LA Wallet added a liveness check to confirm the holder, and it is now accepted at TSA airport checkpoints nationwide.
FaceLock, launched this year, compares a live 3D face scan, captured with FaceTec’s liveness technology, with the photo on a person’s government-issued ID. An organization can then issue a signed credential carrying a UR Code, FaceTec’s barcode format pairing face data with the issuer’s digital signature. The credential can be printed on a card and checked on a phone without a network connection.
Fabre said AI-assisted fraud and convincing fake IDs are hitting universities and banks. Fake student identities can be used to collect federal student aid such as Pell Grants, then escalated into driver’s licenses, checking accounts and loans, he said. FaceLock says its platform is live in Louisiana university systems.
FaceTec’s architecture lets the verification server run in the customer’s own environment, Fabre said, leaving a college in control of its biometric data. “If I don’t have it, there’s nothing to breach,” he said.
Fabre said Envoc’s UR Code work began with low-income and technology-avoidant benefit recipients. In a pilot for farmers market benefits, participants are enrolled from a 2D photo and given plastic cards that farmers can scan to match the cardholder’s face.
Selling liveness to schools and governments requires education and a slow sales cycle, Fabre said, but he expects breach notices and the quality of fake credentials to change that. “Liveness is gonna be the new hotness,” he said.
Envoc is now developing remote liveness challenges that would let a call center verify a person before a password reset, a funds transfer or an addition to a child’s carpool pickup list. “These are things where we wanna know, is the person live, and is it the person that I trust?” Fabre said.
Listen to the full ID Talk conversation, or find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
