Digital identity offers a solution to a range of challenges - from curbing fraud and theft, to enhancing customer service. However, there have been concerns in some quarters about the potential for digital identities to be misused for surveillance or exclusion, or for them to be hacked or stolen.

As biometric identity solutions become more widely adopted across the banking, insurance, healthcare and telecoms sectors, organisations rightly ask: ‘who controls this data, where does it live, and can it be accessed without our knowledge?’

 Robert Falkner, Sales Manager, iOCO SBT, says these concerns are unfounded when organisations harness advanced identity management solutions that assure full data sovereignty and control, along with multi-layered biometric and liveness verification to ensure that a person is who they claim to be.

“A platform like ROC’s unified Vision AI platform, which is trusted by military forces, law enforcement, and global fintech brands, has four main pillars to assure data sovereignty," he says. “These include on-premise and air-gapped deployment within the organisation’s own infrastructure. All data is encrypted and access controlled, with retention and deletion controlled by the organisation. In addition, the platform doesn’t store raw face images but instead stores encrypted biometric templates to reduce breach exposure.”

Falkner says ROC is top ranked in NIST evaluations, iBeta Level 2 PAD certified, aligned with GDPR and ISO standards and holds MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identity Platform) certification for sovereign, government-controlled national identity infrastructure.

He highlights iOCO SBT’s DIMPL Digital Identity Management Platform, built on ROC, which offers security and data sovereignty with a number of advanced AI-enabled capabilities. These include: face recognition, age estimation, deepfake and liveness detection, face analytics, fingerprint recognition, latent fingerprint matching, iris recognition, tattoo matching, licence plate recognition, vehicle recognition, object detection, and gun detection.

“It’s so advanced that you might tell the system to search a crowded street for someone with a particular attribute - for example a red backpack and a beanie - and it will find them,” he says. ‘It offers fast, accurate biometric enrolment for KYC onboarding, turning a selfie into a secure biometric template that can be verified against official documents, with the important liveness detection technology to mitigate the risk of fraud and deepfakes.”

“From an end user or customer perspective, they have the assurance that the organisation they are dealing with is secure,” he says. “They're not sharing personal identifying data with anybody and nobody can access it. It's locked down, encrypted, and even if somebody intercepted the data or managed to steal it, they wouldn’t be able to decrypt the template to steal your information and use it fraudulently.”

“We've built DIMPL on ROC because it’s the best technology of its kind, and offers customers complete peace of mind,” he says.

Its advanced capabilities and myriad use cases are helping local organisations reduce theft and fraud and improve customer experience. For example, the platform helped MTN retail stores improve database integrity, and crucially - reduce registration time from 20 or 30 minutes to two to three minutes and slashed retail fraud from over $1 million a year to zero.

iOCO SBT also harnesses its SDK to embed ROC technology into any existing customer system or database, making it part of existing workflows. Falkner says: “It's written into the process so that when an agent is dealing with a customer and they want to open a bank account or take out a medical aid, the digital identity management and verification is embedded into that process.”

“Digital identities and digital identity management are here to stay,” Falkner says. “It's critical because of the amount of identity, fraud, and theft, that occurs and because institutions get hacked all the time. Credit card numbers, ID numbers, all of those details are hacked and stolen, held for ransom, and have been bought and sold many times over. The only true thing that you can't steal from somebody is their live face, so their face becomes the critical identifier.”