Facial biometrics makes customer authentication and onboarding faster and more convenient for both customers and businesses, while also reducing the risk of identity fraud. Locally developed facial biometrics offers the added advantages of being built for Africa’s demographics, and being billed in South African rands.
This is according to Jeremy Engelbrecht, Managing Director of SoftiDoc – a South African developer of SaaS solutions for document processing, KYC, identity validation and customer onboarding.
Engelbrecht says that while facial biometrics technology has been in use for some time, early models required specialised cameras and equipment. “In the past five years, we have seen significant growth in the use of mobile phones for more advanced facial biometrics authentication and onboarding, which has driven adoption,” he says.
Facial biometrics uptake is growing strongly internationally, now accounting for around 55% of the $35.9 billion global face and voice biometrics market.
Mobile-based facial biometrics is versatile and cost-effective, making it accessible to even small and medium-sized businesses, Engelbrecht says. “Many organisations used to do ID validation through Home Affairs using just the ID number, but found that the costs had become too high. With mobile facial biometrics, organisations have a cost-effective authentication that doesn’t require specialised equipment and is more robust and accurate than using an ID book. It also allows businesses to secure transactions in a way that’s very convenient for customers. They can be authenticated or onboarded from the comfort of their own homes,” he notes.
He explains that using mobile facial biometrics for authentication and onboarding entails a few simple steps: “When a verification check is required, we will then send them an SMS. When the customer clicks on the SMS, a screen will open and prompt them to take a photo of their ID, as well as a three-second selfie clip. Almost instantaneously, our systems confirms if the ID is legitimate, if the person matches the ID, and if they are alive. The system is trained to identify various spoofing techniques, such as masks and replay, and also analyses the South African ID card hologram to confirm if it is genuine. For customer authentication, it will compare this with what is on the database and confirm the person’s identity.”
SoftiDoc facial biometrics assesses the video clip across multiple metrics. “Using four or five different models, the system does a depth map of the person's facial image, carries out texture analysis, tracks how the light reflects on the face, and also applies Fourier transform, which converts image feature data into frequency components. This means it can identify spoofing attempts – for example, we trained the model on hundreds of thousands of various masks and replay attempts. The AI identifies numerous small nuances that the human eye won't pick up,” he says.
SoftiDoc is currently undergoing iBeta Quality Assurance – an accredited third-party testing laboratory that evaluates biometric systems for liveness detection and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD).
High accuracy for Africa
SoftiDoc’s facial biometrics authentication and onboarding systems use multiple AI models trained specifically for the African market.
“We have trained our AI using millions of clips from older phones, various ranges of phones, monitors and webcams. We have also done intensive training using darker toned skins to ensure high accuracy in the African market,” he says.
Engelbrecht notes that most facial biometrics systems available in South Africa are international brands. “Some of the benefits of using our locally developed software are that we are very competitively priced against the dollar, and the fact that we can customise solutions to suit our clients’ needs,” he says. Because pricing is volume-based – at a few cents per transaction – it is very accessible to most businesses, he notes.
In the cloud or on-premises
SoftiDoc is primarily a cloud-based service hosted on AWS. Engelbrecht explains: “We use AWS because it runs GPU servers, which allow us to scale vertically or horizontally, and because this allows us to provide the service to any country. However, in sectors and countries that require in-house or in-country servers, we can also run our services on-premise anywhere in Africa.”
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