Mitek, Digidentity To Help Speed Up GOV.UK Onboarding

Mitek and Digidentity, which both work in digital identity verification, have teamed up to help more people register on GOV.UK Verify more quickly, a press release says.

The two companies, using securely scaled operations, have enabled processing speed of more than 400 applicants per minute to the service, which provides nationals and residents with essential government services during the pandemic, including universal credit, business and self-employment payments, car registration and tax services and pension queries.

Since March, over 1 million GOV.UK Verify accounts have been created, according to the release, and Mitek and Digidentity have helped millions of people create accounts over the years. The process is made secure through the help of forensic security experts alongside advanced banking-grade digital technology.

Multiple layers of security are involved on the user’s side, including scanning one’s ID and taking a selfie. On Mitek and Digidentity’s side comes automatic authentication, with manual human checks only for particularly complex cases.

The idea behind the numerous checks is to do everything possible to stop fraud, the release says. But increasingly sophisticated forgeries mean the technology to verify identities has to keep up, too. In GOV.UK’s case, that means data is checked against highly official sources like government databases and global organizations, the release says.

Sanjay Gupta, vice president, global head of products and corporate development at Mitek, told PYMNTS recently about the new device biometric, which attempts to gauge a person’s identity through the device they’re using. That’s done through the way one holds a device, how fast they type, the number of devices they have and other such things, Gupta said.

The implementation of biometrics isn’t sitting well with everyone, though. A survey by PYMNTS and Mitek found that around 70 percent of respondents who’d recently opened accounts with financial institutions didn’t feel comfortable sharing biometric information. The key could be communication, with the survey finding that 64.1 percent would be more comfortable if institutions assured them their data wouldn’t be shared with third parties.