Company News

Arizona MVD Awards Thales Contract

The Arizona Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Division (MVD), has awarded Thales a three-year contract to upgrade the security features and redesign the appearance of Arizona’s driving licences and ID cards.

Arizona MVD and Thales will collaborate on card design elements, such as Multiple Laser Image (MLI) with alternately visible data elements, and two unique Thales features, Dynaprint and Edge Sealer.

Dynaprint uses multiple high-resolution images and fine line printing for an image flipping effect. Edge Sealer laser-engraves specific data on the card’s edge to form an additional bond which is extremely difficult to reproduce.

Along with the new design, Arizona will join several other Thales partner jurisdictions in North America that have switched to cards made from 100% polycarbonate, a more durable material extending their lifecycle. Cards made of polycarbonate cannot be altered without visibly damaging them, which is key to detecting counterfeited documents.

‘With ID fraud continuing to increase and become more sophisticated, we’re excited to partner with Thales to ensure our Arizona credentials become one of the most secure in the nation,’ said Eric Jorgensen, Arizona Department of Transportation, MVD.

Thales provides driving licences and ID card solutions to 18 jurisdictions across North America: including Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New York and Quebec.

Providing cards with extended usage lifecycle is part of Thales’ commitment towards sustainability. Thales also supports sustainable projects worldwide by offsetting the carbon emissions from all its travel and ID solutions.

Israel’s Pangea Wins $70 Million Contract

Pangea IT has been awarded a government contract valued at over $70 million in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Pangea will develop and operate an advanced criminal biometric system to generate Certificates of Good Standing for DRC citizens.

The project follows a decision by DRC’s government to promote the digitisation of government services in the country. As part of the project, Pangea will deploy a centralised Criminal Automated Biometric Identification System (CABIS) with several biometric features. The project will be carried out based on a PPP (Public-Private Partnership) basis.

The CABIS will make it possible to set up a nationwide digital database which will include the demographic and biometric details of those offenders currently listed in the archive, and will be accessible from 150 police stations across the country.

The system will implement modern crime investigation capabilities, based on fingerprints and handprints.

Pangea was founded in 2018 and employs around 200 people, half of them in Herzliya, Israel and the rest across the globe: including the US, UK, the Netherlands, and Latin America.

UBS Chooses Regula to Automate Onboarding

UBS, the world’s largest private bank, has partnered with Regula, identity verification and forensic solutions developer, to create a new experience for their customers for opening accounts and accessing banking products.

Instead of real-time video interviews, which were previously required by UBS to verify new customers, the enrolment process is now fully automated. This is possible thanks to Regula’s identity verification solutions that recognise and authenticate documents and compare document portraits with users’ selfies to ensure their identities are genuine.

UBS appears to be the first bank in Switzerland to enable automatic identity verification and electronic signature creation. Onboarding for new customers is now available from the UBS Mobile Banking app, from anywhere and at any time.

The procedure is done in four simple steps:

• With the help of a smartphone, the customer scans their ID, which must be a biometric passport. If the customer is a Swiss citizen, they are required to provide a biometric Swiss passport. For non-citizens, it’s obligatory to scan their national biometric passport and Swiss residence permit.

• The scanned passport (and permit) is automatically processed with Regula Document Reader SDK – first, its type and data are instantly identified and verified with Regula’s OCR engine; second, the RFID chip is read and full server-side verification and authentication of the chip data is performed according to the ICAO 9303 standard, including data integrity and genuineness check as well as chip cloning check.

• After the document verification is complete, the customer takes a selfie for a liveness check.

• Finally, Regula Face SDK compares the document portrait (both the visible one and the one in the RFID chip) with the selfie to ensure the person is who they claim to be.

All of these actions are done in less than five minutes, after which, the customer gets access to their freshly created bank account. Also, the identity verification allows UBS to generate qualified electronic signatures for their customers, which they can use widely throughout the country.

UpStack Partners With iDenfy for Identity Verification

Lithuania-based identity verification provider iDenfy has partnered with staffing solution company UpStack to provide biometric identity verification for job applicant onboarding.

Following the increase in remote hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a heightened risk in hiring fraudulent candidates, particularly with the increasing reliance on online candidate selection.

iDenfy has created what it claims to be a robust set of solutions to put a stop to the use of deepfakes, altered documents, and stolen identities of fraudsters that are trying to secure work positions.

UpStack focuses on helping businesses find skilled developers. When they were searching for new online fraud prevention solutions, the company prioritised secure, end-to-end verification and anti-money laundering (AML) service providers – which is how they came to choose iDenfy. iDenfy is now responsible for ensuring that all of UpStack’s applicants are protected, and that their sensitive data is stored in a compliant manner.

By partnering with iDenfy, UpStack managed to expedite the onboarding process, with the company guaranteeing that only legitimate applicants are able to access their talent network.

Furthermore, following the implementation of the new verification system, UpStack’s users go through a simple, four-step process where iDenfy’s biometric technology powered software detects the use of deepfake videos, 3D masks, and other types of fraudulent imagery.

iDenfy officials believe that a flexible and user-friendly ID verification process is critical when it comes to maximising security in online recruitment without losing convenience.