Founded in 2011, IDmission helps businesses verify customers’ identity remotely. The enterprise’s platform supports face scans, fingerprints, video conferences, iris scans, selfies, voice recognition and a number of other ways of using biometrics to verify customers’ identities.
The inspiration for the creation of IDmission came from a lived experience of the founders. IDmission COO Angela Schmuck, CTO Sandeep Gandhi and Ashim Banerjee, the CEO of IDmission, had been working for a payments-processing company. According to Schmuck, around this time Banerjee had a vision.
She said, “He (Banerjee) could really see the need and the rise of digital identity as a gateway to financial services, especially in areas of the world where there are a lot of unbanked and underbanked people. So, based on the opportunities he could see in this space, through the research he was doing with the company we were at, he decided to leave and create IDmission and invite myself and Sandeep to join him.”
Describing the technology, Schmuck said, “The main goal is providing identity proofing services, and we really look to do that across the entire life cycle of either an individual or a business. Our main core service is ID document validation. With this, we support over 4000 IDs from all over the globe. We also do passive liveness detection, meaning when you take a selfie, we make sure that the person is truly alive.”
IDmission provides biometric matching between the ID document and the selfie that was captured and enrols that information onto its platform to do ongoing biometric authentication. These services, Schmuck claims, can be consumed by the firm’s client in a host of different ways, with many of their clients using their services just via an API, where they’re sending IDmission identity documents. Meanwhile, other clients incorporate their services into their existing mobile apps or on their web pages through its mobile and web SDKs.
The company also offers a complete out-of-the-box solution for customers that don’t have any type of technology of their own, which is called identity-as-a-service, as well as an onboarding tool for customers that want to use that to build a web app or a mobile app to support an onboarding process.
Composable KYC
Schmuck said, “With each financial institution that we work with, we evaluate their risks associated with the services they provide to determine what their KYC procedures will be. We’ve found that no two customers are the same and its never one-size-fits all, so we’ve reconstructed our platform to make sure that people can pick and choose and put the puzzle pieces together for their own. This way, they can compose it into a workflow that meets their needs.”
“This is where the wording composable KYC comes from. One business might need identity valuation with a selfie capture, or they might need to do a global screening check or capture a proof of address to confirm that the people actually live where they say they do, or another customer might want us to do age verification – it completely depends on the type of business. Therefore, we found that allowing them to compose their own architecture works quite well.”
How does composable KYC differ from traditional KYC? Schmuck highlighted that traditional KYC is a standard set of processes that can remain predominantly fixed, meanwhile composable KYC means IDmission can support a business that might not be in the financial services space and are therefore not as highly regulated as the financial market. While these non-regulated companies might not need to do global watchlist screenings, they might want to do a criminal background check or a sex offender screening. Therefore, composable KYC allows them to pick and choose what they want to do based on their business needs.
Key market trends
With the biometrics market continuously evolving, the trends that are taking precedence in the market are ever changing, as more and more people take up usage of biometric solutions.
What trends are key to IDmission? Schmuck detailed, “We’ve shifted our focus over the past couple of years and, moving into 2022, we’re focusing on the entire lifecycle of a customer. We’re trying to get our customers to understand that identity can be used across the entire lifecycle, and we are working with a few clients in crypto, gaming, social media, dating sites and the gig economy where KYC is prevalent and required.”
Pandemic effects
How has the pandemic impacted the need and uptake of KYC technologies? According to Schmuck, the pandemic has definitely accelerated the digitisation of KYC.
She said, “When everyone was forced to stay home, there was really no other choice for businesses than to offer digital options, either for their customers or their employees – everybody who was interacting with any kind of system had to have the ability to gain access to that system online because they were stuck at home. So, a digital footprint is something that’s really always on every business’s roadmap, but it might not have been the top priority. I think that the pandemic really forced it to be the top priority and make things happen fast to be able to serve their customers in a different way.”
Future plans and product launches
Going forward, IDmission is planning to level up its technology as it moves towards its next stage of development. Schmuck detailed, “We’ve really been focusing a lot on our technology and upgrading our technology and our underlying platform. We’re upping our game with AI and we’re taking AI-powered machine learning to drive most of what we’re doing in the identity proofing space.”
“We are also doing some significant technology upgrades, utilising micro services to increase our speed of processing, which is something we have to do to keep up in this market. In addition, we’re doing a massive upgrade to our mobile and web SDKs – we’re really focused entirely on making our user experience as simple, clean, and fast as possible. So, whether someone is technically savvy or not, we need to make sure that the user experience works for all of them.
“Again, we’re offering up this platform in a manner that enables our customers to compose what they need with our composable KYC concepts. So, our market focus is shifting away from traditional financial enterprises and looking to grow in areas outside of that. We’re also going to be pushing and marketing our identity-as-a-service solutions to the types of companies that don’t have their own technology and might have small volumes of customers.”
IDmission also recently partnered with digital financial cloud provider Neofy, in a deal that the latter hopes will enable it to automate customer onboarding whilst ensuring strong security.
The company is also planning to launch the next generation of their SDK. The IDmission IDentity 2.0 SDK is a comprehensive toolkit that offers identity proofing services. What stage is the second version at? Schmuck remarked, “We’re currently in beta with a few of our key customers. We’ve been doing many focus groups and have brought in a couple of development contractors just to try it out.
“Many of our customers who use our existing SDK are also trying out the IDentity 2.0 SDK. We’re obtaining their feedback and we’re really looking to do a big marketing push in the beginning of March.”
