Computer Vision News - October 2016

fraud that it wouldn’t happen. “Equally, if you have a tutor who comes to your house to tutor your child, you want to be sure that the tutor has been checked. Likewise, you want to check the person with whom your daughter wants to share a car on BlaBlaCar. “Most people recognize that in order to be a part of the new economy, there is a need for verification . However, what we do is we always ensure that security is of the utmost importance. Penetration testing, ISO 27001, we adhere to all these standards to ensure security; in addition, everyone gives their full consent before they are checked; finally, data is deleted after the check and it does not enter any database: we only keep a record of fraudulent data and documents. That is for fraud prevention.” Kassai admits that the system is exposed to false positives , but this happen nearly always because the quality of the document isn’t good enough. Instead of giving a definitely positive or negative judgement on a document, they use a score. Usually when the quality of the image isn’t good enough, it may well be a false positive. In this case, the client asks the person checked to submit another form of document, to re-upload or resend documents or go to the branch for face to face verification. This essentially means that only 2 or 3 out of every 100 people need to go through a more rigorous manual process as opposed to all of them, which saves a lot of time. When they suspect that it may be a compromised document, they proceed with double checking: 90 to 95% of documents that come through pass the verification successfully. Out of the other five, two may be problematic and three may be questionable, so they only need to double check these ones. Kassai remarks that in the primary elections in the US, people needed to stand in line for 6 to 9 hours in order to vote, while all this could now be done online. As soon as you are able to robustly verify people online , it opens up solutions to many problems, Kassai explains. This includes online voting, the gun control problem, or even the Syrian refugee crisis: the project is to work with governments so that they can verify someone in Jordan as a refugee. When they land in the US, they can verify that it is the same person. It alleviates all the concerns that on the transition they may steal someone else’s identity. Onfido gives much importance also to the work they do with banks around the world. There are 2 billion people, representing almost 1/3 of the world’s population, that don’t have a bank account or any access to finance and to the global economy. The reason for that is ridiculous: they are not able to verify their identities, so no one will give them credit or debit cards, cell phones, etc. But there is now a new wave of companies such as PayJoy or Pockit that are extending this kind of services. Pockit, for example, will give anyone in the world a prepaid debit card. Onfido can capture somebody’s face and passport in an emerging country at a library or anywhere with a computer. That’s all is needed to verify location and identity in order to sign up Computer Vision News Application 23 Application “As soon as you are able to robustly verify people online, it opens up solutions to many problems”