Florida Uses Socure to Distribute Homeowner Assistance Funds

Socure is teaming up with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) to help administer the latter’s Homeowners Assistance Fund (HAF) program. The HAF provides financial aid for Florida homeowners whose lives have been affected by COVID-19.

In that regard, the HAF provides needs-based assistance to those struggling to keep up with mortgage payments, including those who are at risk of default and foreclosure. It also offers help to those who cannot afford insurance or essential utilities and energy services.

The problem, of course, is that fraudsters will often try to take advantage of government-run assistance programs. The partnership with Socure is designed to stop that, insofar as the DEO will use Socure’s biometric technology to verify the identities of people applying to the program. In doing so, the DEO will mitigate the threat of identity fraud, and ensure that more funding goes to disadvantaged Floridians instead of cybercriminals.

Socure’s platform should also deliver a better user experience for Florida residents and DEO employees alike. The platform uses face and document recognition to compare a selfie to the image on a photo ID, and boasts an auto-approval rate of 98 percent for mainstream citizens (the rate is a robust 94 percent for thin-file populations like immigrants and millennials). As a result, the solution will remove friction for end users, and minimize the number of cases that need to be referred to an agent for a manual review.

“No citizen should be denied access to the benefits and services due to them or put through extensive manual reviews because of outdated, legacy point solutions for identity verification,” said Socure SVP and Public Sector GM Matt Thompson. “We are incredibly excited to collaborate with DEO and drive advancements in standards, equitable access, and customer experience within the state and beyond.”

Socure recently received NIST Identity Assurance Level 2 certification, which indicates that it is approved for use in government operations that require a high level of identity assurance. The company now provides identity verification services for more than 1,000 organizations after tripling its customer count in 2021.

–

March 4, 2021 – by Eric Weiss