Jumio, a provider of identity verification software that uses artificial intelligence, has partnered with ComplyAdvantage to make database checks part of the process of bringing new customers on board through websites or mobile apps. This could help protect a bank from accepting a terrorist or money launderer as a customer. The new joint product is called JumioScreening.
It is the latest new technology designed to help banks avoid the fines and reputation risks of allowing money laundering to take place within their walls. It can also help prevent fraud. Losses from fraudulent account openings increased from $3 billion in 2017 to $3.4 billion in 2018, according to Javelin Strategy & Research's recent identity fraud study.
Jumio’s technology asks users to scan a piece of government-issued ID (a driver’s license or a passport, say) with their smartphones or webcams.
It can also ask the potential customer to take a video or selfie with so-called liveness detection turned on, so that a fraudster cannot set up an account using someone else’s photo. Jumio compares the live image to the photo in the government ID and determines whether the two are of the same person.
Taking these different identity clues into account, Jumio renders a verdict to the bank on whether the person is who they claim to be.
“There’s a lot of AI baked into that verifying that the identity is valid,” said Dean Nicolls, global vice president of marketing.
In its most recent iteration of the technology, Jumio introduced a new form of liveness detection — a 3D face mask. Using this feature, as customers take a selfie video, they’re asked to position their face within an oval on the phone screen within three seconds.
This corrects a problem with Jumio’s technology. Customers used to be asked to follow a bouncing ball on the screen with their eyes, and the eye movements served as liveness detection. But fraudsters figured out how to spoof this.
The new method of moving the face in and out of an oval is spoofless, the company said. The 3D representation of the face also contains authentication information that can be used in the future.
Banks sometimes add other identity verification steps, like looking up the potential customer’s credit history, before signing up the customer and issuing credentials.
The agreement announced this week with ComplyAdvantage lets Jumio add anti-money-laundering database lookups into the process, to help help banks spot terrorists, money launderers and other suspect characters.
In the new AML screening, all the normal identity verification steps described above are taken. In addition, Jumio pings the ComplyAdvantage watchlists and sanctions lists, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control list, lists of politically exposed persons and adverse-media databases.
Combining identity verification with watchlist lookups helps prevent problems with mistaken identity. For instance, if a potential customer is named John Smith, a bank might find there is a John Smith on a watchlist. It can be hard to know one John Smith from another.
But when you require people to scan their photo IDs and provide a live video of themselves, that can help in a couple of ways. First, criminals are unlikely to want to associate their images with an account involved in money laundering. Second, the information captured from the government-issued ID can help determine whether the applicant is the same person whose name is on a no-no list.
The new product also provides ongoing monitoring of the new customer's identity vis-a-vis the watchlists and will alert the bank if anything changes.
