Asia�s digital ID technology developments gain pace

Real ID advances
with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and cross-racial facial recognition
accuracy

SINGAPORE -�Media
OutReach - 10 December 2018 – The recent spate of
data breaches–including a flaw
in Google+ that led to its shutdown and the reported hacking of 120 million Facebook users’ data–have highlighted the abuse
of digital identity.

 

While having a digital identity brings convenience, the
challenge is to ensure that individuals have full control and protection of
their data. Technologies for safeguarding digital identities have quickly
emerged in the U.S. and Europe, but developments have been slow in Asia due to its
diverse language mix and cross-racial facial features, says Real ID’s CEO Chong
Han Ping.

 

Real ID, whose partners include Alibaba-backed SenseTime, recently launched its screening and face-learning
technology. Its AI and blockchain technology shortens the onboarding and KYC
(Know-Your-Client) process for remittance transactions by as much as 90% and significantly reduces human error, says Chong.

 

“Multi-language verification is rare, and we have
focused our efforts on building partnerships in different markets to improve
our language-learning and OCR technology as well as to shorten machine-reading
time,” he adds. OCR is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer.

Real ID, whose employees
include former data scientists and machine-learning
experts from Tencent, China National Research Centre, and Nanyang Technological
University, is in talks with authorities in India, Thailand,
Philippines, and Indonesia to build a regional digital ID ecosystem for frictionless
cross-border business.

 

Real ID adopts SenseTime’s facial recognition technology,
which is empowered by liveness
detection, face matching and machine learning to eliminate any deception. The use of blockchain technology ensures that records
cannot be altered retroactively without the consensus of the network. A combination
of both on-chain and off-chain transactions also allows verification results to
be audited by different parties, without the need to reveal underlying identity
information. For further
security, the data is backed by validators who are authorised to issue a trust
statement on behalf of the user.

 

Real ID has invented a unified model for creating, collecting, verifying, accepting, and
authorising digital identities, which will establish a self-regulating
ecosystem that connects users, merchants, and certification bodies, Chong
explains.  The company projects that its model
can reach over 10 million users in the region in the next five years.