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Innov8tif Wants to Help You Securely Double-Check the Identity of Your Prospective Customers

Innov8tif Solutions Sdn. Bhd. (Innov8tif) is an AI company founded from Malaysia and expanding its footprints across the Southeast Asia region. Innov8tif helps businesses to widen the sales funnel, speed-up processes without paper and prevent identity frauds.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Businesses are increasingly expanding their services and offers to real-time online channels, with the objective of being contactless in business transactions and to expand outreach of customer touchpoints without physical geographical constraints. This strategy, at the same time, exposes businesses to the risks of onboarding fraudulent customers, which can lead to hefty financial losses from exposure to credit risks. Imagine selling an iPhone through a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) programme to an identity that does not exist in the real world.

Businesses in the banking, financial services, insurance and telecommunication industries are also regulated for compliance with know-your-customer (KYC), anti money-laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorism Financing (CTF) rules. Breach of regulatory requirements in this aspect can lead to huge penalties by government authorities, and even a suspension of business operating license.

How are you solving that problem?

Using AI-based innovation, Innov8tif is part of the RegTech ecosystem providing software solutions to automate customer due diligence check points and prevent impersonation. Innov8tif developed some patented algorithms to authenticate Southeast Asian identity documents submitted from customer self-service online applications, using computer vision technology. Collectively, Innov8tif’s product offerings to support electronic KYC (e-KYC) business cases are branded as EMAS eKYC.

Generally, there are 3 models of e-KYC around the world:

  1. Identity authentication and matching
  2. Video verification
  3. Digital ID scheme by authority

EMAS eKYC is primarily designed to support the first model listed above, not just by preventing impersonation using liveness check and biometric verification, but to also verify the legitimacy of officially valid identity documents. In the Philippines, there are at least 10 types of officially valid identification documents recognised by the banks.

Embracing the climate of low-touch economy, Innov8tif believes that EMAS eKYC will eventually touch every customer onboarding journey we are experiencing day-to-day as a consumer. To businesses, such technology helps to widen outreach of sales channels without restriction from physical locations or branches, and business operating hours. These factors help to reduce customer onboarding cost, which lead to business’ ability to offer more creative products and services at competitive fees. To the consumers, we are benefitting from easier accessibility to choices. Imagine, if robo-advisory investment products were operating on branch-based operations, would this innovative investment option be easily accessible to consumers who are not residing in cities? And, even when a mobile network operator was to offer the most attractive mobile plan, could it be easily rolled out to all consumers across vast geography? Let us imagine places of archipelago.

KYC remains a crucial part of online transactions that some companies to this day do not get right or miss out on a lot of optimization of it.

How has the pandemic impacted your company?

In many ways, the pandemic has benefited us in the business aspect as the adoption of our technologies were accelerated because of it. Businesses who were on a wait-and-see approach fast tracked their adoption and were more willing to try these new technologies as one of the ways to digitalise their business safely.

The pandemic has also accelerated the use of virtual technologies and that has saved us much cost in customer acquisition as well in terms of business travelling and time saved. The only downside of it is the lack of personal touch with our key customers as compared to face-to-face engagements we had previously.

We also had to make some changes into the operational aspects of running the business as we are confined to our homes most of the time. Converting manual processes into automated processes gave us the ability to operate quite seamlessly despite the challenges faced. We also adopted the use of digital signature platforms to facilitate a legal relationship with our customers.

Where do you see your company going in 5 years?

We hope to serve the world with our technologies and would certainly be glad if we can be a reputable brand in the digital ID Assurance space operating in the various continents around the globe. With the increase in requirements to reduce fraudulent online transactions, it will always begin with a verified online identity. We believe that more and more retail businesses will rely on our services to ensure who they are selling to online is not a potential fraudster. We also believe Governments will enact regulations to protect consumer interests driving adoption of our services. As such we will be one of the leaders in the industry.

What is the next big challenge in information security?

Not an expert in information security trends. Not sure if quantum computing will be a validated risk to today’s cryptography best practices in near future.

An optimal identity verification method prior to a transaction could save untold amounts of time, money, and effort to one company, not to even mention keeping the regulators off their backs.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We do not believe that in order to be a world leader in this industry, we have to set up offices around the world. We believe that ID Assurance technologies need a certain level of localization and therefore would like to collaborate with potential partners in the other countries to share and exchange know-hows and business opportunities arising from a certain market.

If you have any intention to leverage on what we already have or you already have some technologies of value of which you believe are able to add value to our offerings, feel free to contact us by sending an email to [email protected] and start a conversation with us.

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