1Kosmos Unifies Identity Verification User Journeys Across Web and Mobile Platforms

Robert:
Hi everybody. Welcome to IBA Friday. It's been a while since we've had an IBA Friday. Lots of things happening here at 1Kosmos that, I don't know, just kind of filled up our schedules, I guess. So for those of you that count on these things every two weeks, our apologies for it being a month or more since talking to everybody last. But, it's great to be back.

So, Sheetal, today we've got something to talk about because, as I just referred to, we had lots of things going on here. And one of those things, coming from your group, was the ability to do a web-based journey to do identity verification. We've talked many times about our app-based version, but there's been some significant enhancements to the web-based version. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about that and then we'll get in and I'll give you my experience as we went through it.

Sheetal:
Okay. So I think web-based identification, especially in the market, we see a huge, huge, huge, huge increase where everybody's wanting to verify who's behind any kind of transaction. Whether you are shopping, whether you renting a contracting machine from a Home Depot kind of scenario, anything. You see a lot more users going through identity verification. So there's a huge proliferation in this particular space. But the big thing is nobody wants to download an app for that. They just want it to be there, come there, get it done, and get it out of the way. And also remotely, when nobody's present we want to be able to do that.

So with that in mind, I think we've made a big splash into this market, making sure that we are able to support identity verification without ever having to have an app, you just are able to do it on a browser. Because this is an end user journey, there's a big focus on making it slick. It's got to be easy for a user to get through because they are presenting a government identity, we are taking pictures of them, making sure everything just goes seamlessly.

So yeah, so that's been happening here at 1Kosmos, making sure that we're making a splash.

Robert:
Sweet. One of the things that we like to talk about in terms of one of our core focuses as a company is the experience behind a lot of this stuff. And you're right, not everybody wants to download another app. So I can completely understand why you guys have been working so hard at trying to make this app-less and just doing it through a browser, whether it be on your mobile device or on your desktop, right?

Sheetal:
Yes, we can do both. So if you have somebody sitting in front of a desktop, just point your ID and we can capture right there.

Robert:
I would expect nothing less from you and the team, Sheetal. All right. So listen, I put what I did in some slides, so something that we don't normally do here on IBA Friday, I'm going to show a couple slides. And you sent me some images in terms of some of the reporting stuff that we can talk about as well. So let me share my screen and then we can just go through that. So let me do this and then I'm going to do this and I'm going to share, and I'm just going to pause that for a second and I'm going to-

Sheetal:
Just to set the stage. So, Robert's going to be the customer who's been prompted for ID verification. If he's at a bank and he's opening an online bank account, he's an employee who's trying to do remote identity verification. The customer has the opportunity to send a link to Robert and tell them, hey Robert, complete the ID verification and this is what they would see. It's a completely customizable journey because as an enterprise, you get to decide what kind of journey you want the user to take. Do you want it to be very informative, which means you add a lot more instructions upfront? Or do you want it to be really quick, which means you are focused more on conversion? So every part of this journey is customizable, that's the beauty of it, just making sure that it's very tailored to your audience.

Robert:
I mean, not everybody probably wants to use the 1Kosmos color palette.

Sheetal:
Absolutely. So that's one of the big asks, right?

Robert:
All right. So I clicked on the link and I got a, what do you want to verify? Driver's license or passport? So I picked the driver's license one because that's something that we know everybody has and that would probably be the main document that people would use right off the top. But we can do passport. I think the other one that was on there was national ID, correct?

Sheetal:
Yes. We can do a passport, driver's license and any kind of ID card.
Robert:
Fair enough. All right. So it said, hey, do you want to start the verification? I was like, wait, sure. I checked the box to make sure that I read the consent notice, which as we all know, nobody does those things. But I did that and then I said, let's get started.

So the first thing it asked me to do was to scan the front of my driver's license. So I had my driver's license here and I had a nice dark background, so I figured that that would be good for the contrast. It then opened up the camera on my phone that asked if I could use it, and then it wanted to scan the front of my ID. Now, I'm not going to show you that because that was going to be too hard to do the video and scratch all my ID information out. So I'm not going to show you that part, but you can kind of see there's my driver's license right there.

Anyway, after I did that, it showed me a picture that it took of the front of the ID, which I thought was kind of cool. And it said, hey, does this look good? Is there any weird glare? Is there anything that might not look right? And if so, do you want to retry it? So it gives you a little bit of instructions in terms of what you should be looking for. It looked pretty good.

For those of you that are not Canadian, that's an Ontario, Canada driver's license. So one of the benefits of our platform is that we work in a lot of countries, over 200, 205, somewhere around there, and this one is just the Ontario one, relatively new one. And then from there it asked me to scan the back. So there's a front, there's a back of my driver's license, it's got a little PDF 417 barcode on the back of that. So it reads all that stuff, right?

Sheetal:
Yep. So really quickly. So I think the trick here is to really get a good capture of the ID itself. So behind the scenes we have a capture engine that's extremely powerful. It doesn't wait for the user to capture an image. It looks and it's continuously processing. When it finds a good image, just boom, it captures, it presents it to you. So we don't wait for the user. We know when we have the data that we need.

Robert:
That is true. Yeah, I didn't click anything, it just took it automatically, which was kind of cool. Yeah, good experience there that you built in Sheetal.

Okay. So one of the big things that we do here at 1Kosmos is that we want to verify that the person with the identity document is the person kind of scanning it in. So we want to make sure that the face of the person that's entering the information is the same as the face that's on the document itself. So we do a little bit of triangulation. So that's the same experience on the website or on the app-less journey here. So now it's asking me to provide my selfie, there's my selfie. And then it said, awesome, you can go back to the original browser that you started on. So when I did that, it gave me the information that it pulled, which I thought was kind of neat, just so I guess I could verify it. Sheetal, is that the idea behind that?

Sheetal:
Yes, and this is totally configurable. In this particular scenario, we wanted to show the user what we extracted from the document. So this is everything that 1Kosmos can provide to anybody who needs the information. All the extracted data that you can see here.

Robert:
It says that I'm in Canada, what type it is, it's a driver's license, which is pretty neat. It then got into the information, I'm in Ontario. I'm male, I was born in June. And yeah, so what I thought was interesting was the fraud checks that it performs and that the overall result in the fraud checks was that it passed. I know it says high there. But the idea there is that you passed all the checks, your assurance is high. So when we look at something like the fraud checks that it performs, tell me a little bit about what's going on there.

Sheetal:
So, fraud checks is all the algorithms that were running behind the scenes, especially around a template that your ID has been verified against. Then it also checks for was there a hand that was presented as part of the document capture, which really tells us that it was a real ID. Was the ID black and white, was there a photocopy presented? Many of these kind of information is what we do as part of fraud checks. And this is a learning algorithm. So over time it just gets better and better and better. So we do that. And then this is a configurable experience, which means that if you want a really high score in terms of fraud detection, then you would set that bar really high. And if you are a little more tolerant, then you would probably set it a little bit lower so you'll have a higher rate of pass when it comes to ID verification.

But the other things, there's One Fraud Detection Check, which is our biggest, most popular check. But the baseline, what we always do with any document that comes in is we're checking for liveness. We don't want anybody presenting a document that's a photocopy, a black and white or a copy of a copy. So those kind of document, we're making sure it's not expired, it's our live document that we're presenting and the headshot or selfie comparison, which is that it presented their document and the live selfie is a perfect match. So yeah, this is all that we do in terms of fraud detection to make sure that they are who they say they are.

Robert:
Yeah, that's pretty neat. So at that point I was done and my identity would've been verified, and then the next step, depending upon the organization would be whatever that next step is, create the account, get the password-less authentication based on that, all those fun things. But one of the things that you did want to talk about as we're just kind of getting close to the end here was some of the reporting details that you can provide. And one of the ones that I thought to be very interesting, just because I'm a marketing guy and I'm always looking for things that we can boast, was this number here. It showed how long it took for Frank, who's another employee here at 1Kosmos, took him 26 seconds to get his documents in, which I thought was pretty remarkable that we can use that data later on maybe. Tell me a little about what you captured here. And then there's another slide, another image here that I can pop up.

Sheetal:
I think a big part is when you're doing verification, you want to be able to report on what went right, what went wrong. So, as an administrator we are able to tell you that who are the people who completed ID verification? What kind of documents did they present, what kind of data, how long it took? And a big ask from our customers is, which IP did they come in from? You don't want people coming in from a completely unknown IP, unknown geo presenting all this information, so we do that. And then of course we also have the ability to share the images and the entire raw response, which gives you an entire collection of what scores contributed to this particular ID verification being successful.

Now as a company, we've always believed in having privacy preserving approaches. So this is a configurable experience, which means that as an administrator and a lot of our production customers do not retaining this personally identifiable information. So for them, we make sure that this data or sensitive data is completely hidden or discarded right after the session is done. So as an end customer, you are only responsible for holding the scores and the actual verification, did Robert's ID pass or fail, and we're discarding all of this valuable privacy information in the right way. So that's what we've built here and we're so excited to share with all of our customers this entire ID verification journey and how flexible it is. If anything, we've seen a whole bunch of use cases, especially in the last one year, Robert, we can say that different kinds of use cases that have come up where we've seen people needing identity verification in their journey.

Robert:
Yeah. It's certainly something that has been trending quite highly over the last maybe six months. And I think some of the recent breaches that have happened and then just the ability or the technology being where it is, it makes it... I almost said a bad word, it makes it really easy to implement these things and have a positive user experience in doing it. Because nothing worse than early on when you used to have to scan documents and send them in. Where did they go? Who knows? But the fact that you can just do it all digitally now. And organizations really don't need the driver's license number, they just need to know whether or not the driver's license number exists and it belongs to that person. The number itself is really irrelevant. We just need to make sure that the person that's presenting it is the person that's presenting it to try to verify that identity and that person actually exists. It's not a synthetic identity, it's not a made up document, whatever that is. So the fact we can do all that stuff through a web browser now is pretty cool.

Sheetal:
Yep, yep.

Robert:
Awesome.

Sheetal:
Awesome.

Robert:
You blurred out your background, we can't see your beautiful tree.

Robert:
Show it off. It looks amazing.

All right. Okay everybody. That's it for this IBA Friday. I think we might have one more before the holidays and if we don't, just in case, but I'm pretty sure that we will, have a happy holidays.

Sheetal:
Well, we're looking forward to your ugly sweater.

Robert:
Yeah, that's right. I got to get my ugly sweater. I'll be sure to wear the ugly sweater.

But anyway, thanks everybody. Great to have you join us and we'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks. See you later, Sheetal.

Sheetal:
Okay. Bye.

Robert:
Thanks again.