Selfie Verification

Introduction:

The integration of financial services carries the risk of fraud and resulting financial losses. While various fraud prevention measures exist, they often struggle to balance the need for fraud risk mitigation with maintaining a positive user experience. To address this challenge, Unit has implemented Selfie Identity Verification.

Selfie verification is a automated method for verifying identity and authenticating a photo ID. The process is integrated into the customer application process, during which, the user is prompted to take a selfie which is then compared in real-time to the provided ID document to confirm that the user's identity matches the one on the document. This technique provides effective fraud prevention while minimizing impact on the user experience.

Application Steps:

1. Obtain approval from banking partner - Contact your Customer Success manager to guide you through the approval process.

2. Test integration with Vouched: At this point, you will test integration with Vouched (job IDs received from Vouched at this stage cannot be process by Unit) using the Vouched JS Plugin or mobile SDKs. This will involve evaluating real data and requires a Vouched pre-prod testing public key.

3. End-to-end testing and deployment: Once you have completed testing, you can begin the process of deploying your integration with Vouched. This will involve testing the full flow of creating an application and sending the Vouched Job Id to Unit for final evaluation. This requires a Vouched-Unit Live public key.

caution

Please contact Unit to obtain the necessary public keys. Public keys generated independently with Vouched are not supported by the Unit-Vouched integration.

Flow description:

1. Set the value of the useSelfieVerification evaluation parameter of the application:

• If the applicant is an individual, the selfie verification setting is done on the application level by adding the useSelfieVerification attribute to the Create Application
• When the applicant is Business, Selfie Verification can be done either for the Officer, any of the Beneficial Owners, or both. You’ll have the flexibility to ask for Selfie Verification for any of these individuals by adding the useSelfieVerification attribute to these entities in the Create Application

Possible Values:

• Never - This is the default value. When the useSelfieVerification attribute is NOT added to the application request the value, Selfie Verification will never be required by default. If needed, you can add this attribute and set it to Never to achieve the same result.
• Replace Identification - The requirement to provide an ID Document will be replaced with the requirement to perform a Selfie Verification. When the value is set to ReplaceIdentification and an ID document is required, a document of type SelfieVerification will be included in the response (instead of document type of IdDocument).

2. An application.awaitingDocuments webhook will be fired.

3. Initialize the Vouched SDK to complete a selfie verification: The Customer (or the Business’s officer or Beneficial Owner) should now be taken through a selfie verification process using the Vouched SDK.

4. Once both the Selfie picture and ID picture are taken, Vouched will process the inputs and return a response that includes a job ID. See here for an example of an evaluation response from Vouched. In order for Unit to evaluate the Selfie, you’ll need to call the Verify Document endpoint with the Vouched Job ID that was provided to you by Vouched in the previous step.

5. Post the Vouched job ID to Unit for a final evaluation of the selfie verification Unit will extract the Selfie data of your Customer and will evaluate the results against predefined rules and thresholds in order to make a decision if the application is approved or denied. In some cases the application will need to be manually reviewed in order to make a decision. In these cases you should expect the application to be in PendingReview status until a decision is made and the application is Approved or Denied.

Integration guidelines

Vouched is the supported vendor for Selfie Verification. In order for Unit to evaluate the application against the selfie verification results you will need to integrate with Vouched and embed the Vouched SDK into your web/mobile user interface.

With Vouched integration you’ll be able to support:

• Web applications using Vouched JS Plugin.
• Mobile applications using Vouched Mobile SDKs for iOS and Android devices. Helper guides for both SDKs can be provided upon request.

Please refer to the table below for a review of Vouched supported features. You may customise some of them for a tailored configuration of the process:

Feature	Additional info
Facial recognition & Matching	Detects, verifies and analyzes a user’s face to match it with the photo on the user’s identity document.
ID Examination & Data Extraction	By using OCR technology, data from the ID document is extracted and examined to it can used during the evaluation.
Liveness Detection	Four types of liveness gestures are supported: Look straight ahead [straight]: the user takes a selfie and Vouched detects minor facial movements like blinking. Look left, look right [orientation]: the user takes a selfie and moves their face left and right. Open-close mouth [mouth]: the user takes a selfie and is asked to open and close their mouth. Distance check [distance]: the user takes a selfie and is asked to move away and closer to the camera to detect distance.
Guided Photo Capture	User is automatically guided with prompts such as "move closer", "move further", "there is glare on the ID", etc. You will be able to write your own instructions to better guide the user throughout the process until the Selfie and ID Document photos are taken.
Auto Capture	The photos will be automatically taken when the conditions are optimal. Because users will often try to take photos in poor conditions (e.g., a dark room) where conditions will never be suitable for a good photo, Vouched provide the ability to revert manual control to the user after a specific number of seconds, configured by you.
White Labeling	You can change the logo, colors, and even the text to make sure it meets your needs and matches your brand.
ID/Selfie Score Thresholds	Scores are given across these three categories: ID: Overall identity score of the ID Selfie: Overall identity score of the selfie Face Match: how the face match the ID
Retries	Settings for amount of time and number of attempts to capture the user’s ID and selfie images.

Supported documents

Please refer to the list of supported documents supported by Vouched and to the corresponding list of acceptable ID documents by applicant type and nationality specified on the End Customer Applications guide. Note that some types of IDs may be supported by vouched and will be processed successfully but if they do not fit the applicant type and nationality the application will be rejected.