Selfie Biometrics Specialist Says COVID-19 is Kickstarting the Digital Economy

Innovatrics believes that COVID-19 is normalizing digital services in the same way that the iPhone normalized biometric authentication for consumers. In that regard, the company noted that e-commerce penetration jumped an astonishing 10 percent in the first eight weeks of the pandemic. For reference, penetration sat at only 16 percent in 2019, and needed a full 10 years to climb 10 percentage points before reaching that level.  

The figures come from a recent Innovatrics webinar, where Acuity Market Intelligence’s Maxine Most was the keynote speaker. In her presentation, she argued that COVID-19 has had an impact that is comparable to that of the iPhone 5s in 2013, insofar as people adopted a new security standard virtually overnight. Just as people started using fingerprint recognition once they had it in their hands, so are they becoming more comfortable with digital services and remote onboarding now that lockdowns have forced them to avoid physical establishments.

Innovatrics credited the financial industry for pioneering the use of consumer-facing remote onboarding services, especially since the industry has some of the strictest privacy and anti-fraud regulations. The technology has started to expand to other industries now that people are more familiar with digital onboarding practices.

Innovatrics, of course, is best known as a provider of digital onboarding services. The company’s Digital Onboarding Toolkit combines face and document recognition, and leverages a passive liveness detection system with iBeta PAD compliance. The system is able to complete the liveness check with a selfie to generate much lower abandonment rates than more traditional liveness systems that require some form of user interaction. However, the company noted that a visible security check can instill a sense of confidence and security in some situations.

“If it’s a one-time task such as opening a new account, active liveness can be OK, but it would be a nuisance to do it every time one logs in,” said Innovatrics Global Sales Director Peter Martis. “With unobtrusive passive liveness check, it can easily be performed with every transaction. And it works on-device, so it doesn’t need high-throughput data connection.”

Innovatrics’ facial recognition algorithm has performed well in prior rounds of NIST testing.

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November 11, 2020 – by Eric Weiss