Learn from the race to REAL ID to cut costs and boost customer experience

A US initiative to combine state and federal identification documents is accelerating demand for technology-driven customer and document-centric solutions, which could cut costs and improve customer and employee experience in financial services, insurance, the public sector, or any business with customer and employee onboarding challenges.

The emergence of new solutions, such as ABBYY’s “Proof of Identity,” is a response to the REAL ID Act the United States Congress passed in 2005, which comes into force in May 2023. The Act lays out the need for the federal government to “set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses.” There are plans to enforce the use of new and compliant documents for travel on internal flights, among other uses. The result has been queues at driver licensing offices as frustrated motorists stand in line with various proofs of their identity in hand to update their documents.

ABBYY’s IDP experience inspires a “document-centric” solution

ABBYY has combined its expertise in intelligent document processing (IDP) with the ABBYY Timeline process intelligence technology (which features in the HFS Process Intelligence Top 10 Report, 2020) with human-in-the-loop exception handling to come up with an end-to-end solution to speed, automate, and make self-serve the twin challenges of identity proofing and identity affirmation. In responding to the demands of REAL ID, it also shows how line of business (LoB) leaders can fix their onboarding challenges.

It claims its holistic approach reduces risk and speeds the process end to end, vs. rivals that may have elements of the technology but which would need to be stitched together with another tech to deliver the same result.

The firm’s IDP experience has inspired a document-centric approach in which the end user can simply photograph their proof-of-identity documents on their smartphone and affirm who they are by taking a selfie.

ABBYY already has out-of-the-box skills to read utility bills, personal earnings statements, bank statements, lease agreements, remittance advice, and many other documents that can help prove an individual’s identity. Those skills come ready-trained, cutting the time customers may otherwise need to train them with sets of previously gathered documents and datasets.

Take a selfie, and the algorithms get to work to check it’s really you

ABBYY’s IDP, optical character recognition (OCR), and machine learning (ML) capabilities identify and extract the correct data from photographs of documents and biometrics and apply facial matching and liveness detection, in which an algorithm identifies if the source of a biometric sample (in this case the image of your face) is a fake representation or a live human being.

Extracted data is run through data lookups to compare and cross-check with data from other sources. Images are only “taken” when the document, or face, is correctly placed in the frame; users don’t even have to click a button to take the snap.

The self-service solution is already being applied in at least one large state with an established IDP relationship with ABBYY. Each use can save the state $10 to $60—the cost of handling the process in person in a brick-and-mortar environment, depending on the size and location of the branch.

The solution may have its origins in the need to solve a government problem, but it can be just as useful in any use case where proof of identity and affirmation of identity is a challenge, particularly when time is short or risk is high, for example, in loan and mortgage applications, insurance payouts, and emergency loans. Preventing fraud is big business. ABBYY states the average cost of dealing with the consequences of fraud is two to three times the initial fraud loss incurred by businesses, with $3.13  spent by retail businesses for every $1 of fraud they are hit by.

The Bottom Line: ABBYY is lining up value cases that can help LoB leaders win the argument to invest in experience outcomes.

Self-service and heavily automated proof and affirmation of identity are important for any enterprise in which onboarding customers and employees and proving they are who they say they are is business critical. Line of business heads, who place quality of experience ahead of top-line set-up costs, will prefer ABBYY’s end-to-end approach. The more proof points ABBYY can come up with, such as reducing document processing time from two minutes to 45 seconds, the easier it will be for those LoB heads to overcome the price-conscious preferences of their IT departments.