OREANDA-NEWS. ICAR, the leader in fully automatic solutions for identity validation, has incorporated new features into its desktop and mobile solutions in order to improve usability, user experience and security in customer onboarding processes. 

Online customer onboarding processes are increasingly common, especially in sectors such as the financial sector. It started with online transactions, and now accounts can be opened online and products or services can be contracted. Some financial institutions even operate exclusively online. 

But these processes also expose users and companies to problems such as online fraud and identity theft that affect thousands of people each year and translate to millions of dollars in losses for financial institutions. This leads companies like ICAR to develop increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to unequivocally validate customer identities. 

Liveness testing checks whether the person really exists
One of the most widely accepted functions is liveness testing, one more step in biometric authentication. The solution identifies the person by comparing a selfie with the person's identity document. But this isn't always enough: for example, the validation process could be falsified by taking a picture of another picture, known as spoofing. Now, with liveness testing, the application does not take the picture unless the person performs a certain movement, such as a wink or blink of the eyes, to ensure that a real person is being photographed. 

Usability improvement: automatic photo
In order to improve the user experience, which is essential in order for companies to avoid having customers abandon online processes, ICAR has also implemented automatic capture of photos that users take of their document as part of the validation. Thus, they do not need to worry about focusing or framing, the system automatically focuses and captures without you needing to press a button. In addition, the quality of the image for authentication purposes is improved.