This explainer essay will examine how our Face Match for Africa service works and its benefits for various industries, including telecoms, fintech, banking, and more. We’ll show you how our service can help your business save time, reduce errors, and prevent fraud, all while providing a seamless and user-friendly experience for your customers.
Picture this: You’re in a rush to open a new bank account, and you’ve been waiting in line for what feels like forever. Finally, it’s your turn, and you hand over your ID for verification. But instead of a quick scan, the teller takes a closer look, asks you to remove your glasses, and tells you to tilt your head at a certain angle.
Imagine if there was a faster, more convenient way to verify your identity…
Say Hello to Face Match Service for Africa👋
Whether for onboarding new customers or confirming a current subscriber, our Face Match Engine serves multiple use cases for various industries that can be tweaked to fit your business needs as you scale. Here are a few ways you can benefit from the service:
- Account opening: With Face Match, banks can easily confirm the identities of new and old customers in and out of the bank office, ensuring they comply with KYC regulations while improving the customer experience.
- Transactions and Lending: Financial institutions can use Face Match to add more security to transactions. Customers can be prompted to take a selfie to ensure that the account holder authorises the transaction and not a fraudster attempting to transfer money from the account.
- SIM card registration: Telecom companies can use Face Match to verify old and new customers that register for new SIM cards, preventing identity theft cases and sim swap fraud.
- Travel and Law Enforcement: Government agencies can validate the identities of passport and visa applicants, ensuring that only legitimate applicants are granted travel documents. This system can also eliminate ghost workers and identify unscrupulous persons by comparing images of individuals to known databases of criminals, thereby speeding up investigations.
- Online account creation and Remote customer service: Verify customers’ identities when creating new accounts on e-commerce websites or attending to complaints, ensuring that only authorised users can access sensitive information such as payment details and order history.
How the Service Works
Verified.africa uses AI algorithms to capture high-quality images in real-time, perform liveness detection checks, clean up backgrounds, and verify identities. Let’s break it down.
Liveness Detection Checks
Liveness detection prevents fraudsters from impersonating someone else. Our Face Match Engine can determine whether the user taking the selfie is a live person using motion detection, head tracking, and facial movement analysis.
Motion detection analyses the movement in the video to determine whether the user is a live person or a static image or video. The system can detect subtle signals, such as changes in facial expressions, blinking, or nodding.
Head tracking observes the movement of the user’s head to ensure that it moves naturally and consistently. For example, if the user moves their head too quickly or unnaturally, it could be a sign that they are using a static image or video.
Facial movement analysis checks the movement of the user’s facial features to ensure that they are consistent with a live person. For example, our system can detect whether the user’s lips are moving when they speak or whether they are making facial expressions.
Background Cleanup
This feature is essential for ensuring that the focus of the image is solely on the person’s face. We use advanced algorithms to remove background noise and distractions like objects or other people in the background.
Our system analyses the image to identify the critical features of the person’s face, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. Then, it removes any other characteristics that could interfere with the identification process. It can also adjust the lighting to ensure the face is visible and easily recognisable.
This is significant in situations where the lighting or background of the image is poor, improving the accuracy of the facial recognition process.
Face Verification
To confirm that only authorised users can access sensitive information, we use facial recognition technology to compare the image of the individual’s face with the reference image, such as a passport or driver’s license.
We can determine whether both images match by analysing vital facial features such as the distance between the eyes, the nose’s shape, and the jawline’s contours. We also check for other features, such as the eyes’ colour or the eyebrows’ shape, to guarantee the user’s identity is verified with 99.9% accuracy.
Image Quality Validation:
Poor image quality can lead to errors in the facial recognition process, so we check the quality of the image to ensure that it is clear and accurate.
Another essential feature of the Face Match Engine is its ability to capture images that meet global International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards. These standards define the requirements for machine-readable travel documents, such as passports, and specify the technical characteristics of the facial images used.
We consider lighting conditions, facial expressions, and poses, ensuring that only high-quality images are captured and verified.
Get Started with Verified.africa
Integrate the Face Match service into your business in four easy steps:
Evaluate your business needs: Consider how the Face Match Engine could benefit your business and which use cases would be most relevant. Whether one service or the entire bundle.
Contact us: Schedule a consultation with one of our experts.
Customise your integration: Our team will work with you to design the integration process based on your business needs and requirements. You can implement the face match engine directly into your current workflow through SDKs and APIs.
Start using the Face Match Engine: Once the integration is complete, you can use the Face Match service via the web portal or API and enjoy faster, more accurate identity verification.
