FacePhi Steers Into Car Sharing With WiBLE Partnership

“Entering the shared mobility industry with WiBLE, in the field of car sharing, allows us to access a sector with great potential and increasing demand, as it represents an efficient mobility alternative.” – Javier Mira, CEO, FacePhi

FacePhi is expanding into the car sharing market thanks to a new partnership with WiBLE, a Spanish car sharing service that lets customers rent a Kia Nira zero-emissions vehicle by the minute.

As with other car sharing services, WiBLE customers can access vehicles from WiBLE parking hubs. But the service’s partnership with FacePhi offers a compelling innovation, enabling customers to register and access a car through selfie-based authentication on their smartphones.

As FacePhi and WiBLE explained in a statement announcing the collaboration, all a given customer needs to do is to take photos of the front and back of an official identity document, and to upload a selfie photo. FacePhi’s biometric technology will match the selfie to the user’s ID, and will use liveness detection technology to ensure that the user really is present during the authentication process.

For WiBLE CEO Carlos Blanco, the collaboration represents a competitive edge thanks to its leveraging of innovative technology. “Technology is a fundamental lever for evolving the service and improving the experience of our clients,” he said, “which is why we must work with leading companies in their technological areas such as FacePhi.”

This particular application of biometric technology represents the latest instance of a long-anticipated trend. As far back as 2017, Fujitsu America was predicting that biometric authentication would become the standard means of accessing shared vehicles. The next couple of years saw it start to emerge in practice, with Brazil’s Turbi using FaceTec selfie biometrics for car access and HyreCar turning to Mitek for selfie onboarding.

For FacePhi, the WiBLE partnership offers not only its first foray into the car sharing market, but the latest indication of its overall expansion beyond the financial services sector in which it built its business foundation. The company detailed other growth efforts, including air travel and smart city deployments, in its most recent business update, covering the record growth FacePhi achieved over the past year.

“Entering the shared mobility industry with WiBLE, in the field of car sharing, allows us to access a sector with great potential and increasing demand, as it represents an efficient mobility alternative,” commented FacePhi CEO Javier Mira.

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February 22, 2022 – by Alex Perala