TELUS Digital has expanded its partnership with identity verification provider Sumsub to broaden the scope of digital identity and fraud prevention services offered to clients in Canada and beyond. The collaboration now includes use cases beyond customer onboarding, extending to areas such as remote employee verification and operational risk mitigation across regulated industries.
Broader Applications and Regulatory Context
The development builds on TELUS Digital’s ongoing involvement in digital identity initiatives, including its 2021 collaboration with WestJet on biometric boarding. The renewed partnership with Sumsub, however, targets a wider range of sectors – such as telecommunications, finance, insurance, and human resources – where secure identity verification and compliance are business-critical.
Sumsub’s identity verification technologies support remote onboarding workflows with features like document verification using AI-based OCR, email and phone verification, IP risk assessments, and liveness detection. These tools are now being used by TELUS Digital to verify not only customers but also employees working remotely – a use case that has gained importance amid shifting workforce dynamics.
Regulatory compliance is central to the offering. In Canada, the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) continues to push for standards-based digital ID through the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework. TELUS’s work with Sumsub aligns with these standards, while also responding to growing privacy expectations and regulatory scrutiny. Canadian privacy commissioners, for instance, have previously flagged risks associated with facial recognition systems, reinforcing the need for compliant, secure alternatives.
Combatting Fraud and Streamlining Onboarding
Sumsub has recently expanded its digital ID offerings, including a partnership with Volt to develop open banking-powered verification tools and the launch of a Reusable Digital Identity Product Suite. The suite enables users to complete Know Your Customer (KYC) checks once and reuse that verified identity across multiple services, reducing redundancy and improving onboarding speed.
These tools are particularly relevant as identity fraud continues to rise. According to industry data, deepfake-related fraud attempts quadrupled globally between 2023 and 2024. Sumsub’s solutions aim to counter emerging threats, including synthetic identities, with layered security and fraud detection measures.
From a business perspective, TELUS Digital and Sumsub emphasize the operational advantages of deploying advanced verification tools. Automating compliance checks can reduce onboarding times, lower operational costs, and decrease fraud-related losses, all while maintaining strong data protection standards. Sumsub’s systems are GDPR-compliant and designed to ensure user privacy and transparency.
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May 7, 2025 – by the ID Tech Editorial Team
