The post TECH5’s Patent for Decentralized Digital Identity Verification System and Method is Published appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

Famoco and TECH5 Announce Global Partnership.

Famoco, a Trusted Mobile and Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution provider, and TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, announce global partnership. Famoco launches a new Android wireless device with TECH5’s multi-biometric contactless capture technology – T5-AirSnap – integrated.

Famoco Touch FX206 is a sovereign Android OS mobile payment-enabled device build for business. The size of a smartphone, it has 5MP and 13MP cameras, a battery of 5000mAh, a wide 5” screen, NFC, 4G, GPS and an embedded Secure Element, and the ability to capture face and fingerprint biometrics in a fully contactless manner within seconds. This new function does not need a snap-on or any additional hardware for  biometric data acquisition.

T5-AirSnap, integrated with FX206, is a fully touchless biometric acquisition technology powered by AI and deep learning for face and fingerprint biometric modalities. The technology uses the camera of the device for  capture, can check and enhance the quality of captured image(s), run a liveness check and then package and send the data for registration or verification. The resulting data is compliant with relevant ISO standards  and suitable for use with legacy datasets. The T5-AirSnap technology is optimal for onboarding as well as for verification across all vertical markets.

Various service providers and government agencies can benefit from the FX206 device with T5-AirSnap, including telecom – for SIM-card registration, Governments – for onboarding and verification of Health ID,  Refugee ID, and other documents, and more. It can also be used by bank agents in the field for onboarding and transactions, increasing financial inclusion in the country. This handheld secure Android device ensures  seamless transactions for any dedicated purpose. FX206 is connected to the Famoco Mobile Device Management and enables the control and configuration of a range of devices remotely.

“The FX206 with T5-AirSnap is a game-changer in the realm of mobile payment, identity verification, and enrolment. By removing the need for additional biometric hardware, we are delivering a more cost-effective and scalable solution for telecom operators, financial institutions, and government agencies worldwide, enabling seamless onboarding and authentication in the field.” – Comments, Benoit RAVIER Chief Commercial Officer at Famoco.

“We believe that our partnership with Famoco will help to revolutionize the payment industry, as well as improve the experience of digital onboarding in the field. Such innovations truly change the way businesses  interact with their customers, and we are happy to know that our technology is contributing to this movement.” – Says Andy Gray, Vice President Europe & SAARC, Business Development & Sales at TECH5.

The post Revolutionising Payment Devices with Contactless Capture Integration appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, launches its Biometric Derived Keys (BDK) technology called T5-AirKey. T5-AirKey is an innovative BDK technology that uses biometrics to derive keys that can be used to perform cryptographic operations like digital signing and encryption.

This technology provides significant advantages by addressing the vulnerabilities inherent in the conventional and most widely used approach of storing and using static biometric templates for matching, whether on devices or in databases. The BDK functionality is achieved by generating a unique, random irreversible ephemeral key from a fresh biometric capture of face, fingerprints, or any other biometric modality. This real-time key is based on the user’s biometrics, yet revocable, enables encryption and signing of sensitive data, eradicates the need for biometric template databases (honey pots), and eliminates man-in-the-middle attacks and diverse security vulnerabilities. It can not only be used to securely authenticate the user but can be also used for encrypting sensitive data that can only be unlocked by the owner with their biometrics. It can also replace the need for seed phrases required by many digital wallets – one of the biggest reasons for people to lose crypto assets. It will also enable better biometric approaches in IAM systems and passkey-like solutions.

T5-AirKey is designed to address the most pressing challenges of legacy biometric systems, associated with using static biometric templates for matching, either stored in databases, device, or alternatively stored and presented in traditional 2D barcodes like QR codes. This technology mitigates risks such as template exposure for replay attacks, reverse engineering templates to generate face images or identifying traits like gender and ethnicity and overriding match results produced by the probabilistic matcher.

Additionally, the technology eliminates the need for additional encryption during storage and transmission, or complex distributed template storage and matching computation systems. It can be easily combined with other cryptographic technologies to achieve post-quantum cryptography-proof solutions. T5-AirKey can be used in verifiable credentials (W3C VC) stored in digital wallets or embedded in codes, not only enabling encryption but also facilitating selective disclosure by encrypting different claims signed using different modalities of the same person.

ISO 30136 guidelines address biometric template protection, requiring revocability, non-reversibility, non-linkability, and protected matching. However, most existing solutions fail to fully mitigate risks associated with stored templates. “TECH5’s Biometric Template Protection technology meets ISO 30136 compliance by encrypting raw templates. T5-AirKey goes a step further by ensuring that no templates are ever stored, eliminating static data vulnerabilities.” – Comments Rahul Parthe, TECH5’s Co-founder, Chairman and CTO.
With T5-AirKey, TECH5 completes its technology offering for identity management systems, delivering a comprehensive response to modern identity threats while specifically tackling legacy challenges that continue to affect many biometric systems.

“We are proud to launch this groundbreaking suite of technologies that revolutionizes the use of biometrics in cryptographic operations, identity verification, and secure data sharing, offering unparalleled privacy, flexibility, and fraud protection. We look forward to seeing companies implement it and achieve a new level of security in identity management. We are also looking forward to the impact it will have on Digital ID and Digital Public Infrastructure projects globally.” – Says Mr. Parthe.

The post TECH5 Introduces its Biometric Derived Keys Technology for Identity Management appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, has been selected as the biometric technology provider for RENIEC Peru. This project was awarded to TECH5 after winning a public tender. TECH5’s platforms will be used for facial biometric capture and verification during the digital identity validation process to access digital services offered by RENIEC and other entities. RENIEC, the National Registry of dentification and Civil Status, is an autonomous constitutional body of the Peruvian state. Its primary role is to maintain records of vital events such as births, marriages, divorces, and deaths, as well as oversee voter eligibility and registration. Businesses across the country – such as banks, fintech companies, insurance providers, and healthcare organizations – rely on RENIEC for citizen authentication prior to delivering services

For this initial three-year project, TECH5 will provide its T5-AirSnap Face technology for mobile capture, as well as its T5-OmniMatch ABIS platform for facial verification. T5-AirSnap Face is a biometric capture technology powered by AI and deep learning for facial biometrics. The technology enables fast and accurate biometric acquisition using the front or rear camera of a smartphone. It packages the data for verification or registration. Its built-in quality check algorithm ensures the captured image(s) meet high standards for further processing. Additionally, the technology captures high-quality ISO and ICAO-compliant images, which fulfill the requirements for liveness and matching technologies, making it ideal for digital onboarding and verification. During onboarding, these images are sent to the backend for verification using the T5-OmniMatch ABIS platform. T5-OmniMatch ABIS is a mission-critical, multi-biometric matching platform allowing to perform identification, de-duplication, verification, and authentication using face, fingerprint, and iris modalities.

“RENIEC is one of the most advanced citizen identity services, and we are delighted to provide our technology to them and empower such a fundamental organization with TECH5’s platforms, which benefit the Peruvian citizens by securely accessing RENIEC’s applications anywhere in the world using their mobile device or web browser.” – Commented Jeremy James, VP of Sales and Business Development for the CALA region at TECH5 Group.

The post RENIEC Peru Selects TECH5’s Biometric Capture and Matching Technologies for Citizen Authentication Services appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

On this episode the ID Talk podcast, Alex Perala and Tony Bitzionis sit down with Rahul Parthe, CTO, Chairman, and co-founder of TECH5, to explore how decentralization is transforming national digital identity systems. The discussion covers how decentralized approaches can reduce costs, enhance security, and empower citizens, particularly in the Global South. Mr. Parthe shares insights on his vision, as well as the benefits of decentralized data exchange, as well as TECH5’s modular approach to building scalable, privacy-preserving digital public infrastructure.

As Rahul makes clear in the discussion, decentralization is key to ensuring that large-scale digital ID systems are resilient and can resist modern cyberthreats. “If I could divide and conquer — decentralize the infrastructure and the data — then my attack vectors go down, my investment goes down, and I can still achieve what I’m planning to achieve as a country,” he explains.

At a time when privacy concerns and infrastructure challenges are top of mind, this discussion highlights a path forward that balances security, scalability, and citizen empowerment. Don’t miss this fascinating episode that outlines a realistic and adaptable approach to digital identity as these systems begin to be implemented on a massive scale around the world.

Listen to the podcast

Read in media

The post TECH5 Lays the Foundations for Decentralized Digital ID on the ID Talk Podcast appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

This episode of the ID Talk podcast delves into a fascinating new digital ID solution – the GovWallet, which combines biometric digital identity technologies with Visa’s payment technology and infrastructure. To lay it all out, ID Talk hosts Tony Bitzionis and Alex Perala are joined by TECH5 co-founder, Chairman, and CTO Rahul Parthe, with Svyatoslav Senyuta, Government Solutions Regional Leader, CEMEA at Visa.

The GovWallet represents an ambitious effort aimed at a national scale. As Rahul explains, their work on the GovWallet has been about building digital infrastructure, and not simply ID infrastructure. Self-Sovereign Identity is foundational to the GovWallet, but, as Rahul explains, that’s really just a starting point for a wider set of integrated digital capabilities – including, importantly, those that involve payments and other financial transactions, as Visa’s Svyatoslav goes on to detail.

From there, the discussion touches on a range of related questions and topics, including – among other things – financial inclusion, biometric data privacy, and how digital ID technology is already transforming government services, as seen in non-GovWallet examples.

The conversation offers an inside look at one of the earliest and most ambitious ID-focused digital infrastructure efforts in the world, guided by executives with first-hand knowledge and expertise.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, or through the media player via this link.

Read in media

The interview transcript

Alex Perala: Hello and welcome to ID Tech. I am Alex Perala, and this is my colleague, Tony Bitzionis. We recorded an interview with two guests, gentlemen from a pretty big companies Svyatoslav Senyuta from Visa and Rahul Parthe, the Chairman and Co-founder of TECH5. We wanted to talk to them because they have a new government wallet solution, GovWallet. It is a digital ID that integrates Visa’s payment technology. It’s a pretty unique approach to digital ID, and it seems like there’s a real opportunity for it to get some traction in a number of countries and regions.

Tony Bitzionis: This interview includes a lot of information. For example, Svyatoslav is Ukrainian, and he provides examples from Ukraine’s own digital ID system, not related to GovWallet, but a separate system as an illustrative example. And then you have Rahul’s technical expertise. And so, I feel like we’ve got it all in one episode.

Alex Perala: It is super interesting. So, definitely worth listening all the way to the end. We are very happy to be joined by two gentlemen who can speak to a really exciting project that is helping to build the emerging digital infrastructure that we see popping up around the world. Welcome to the show, and I would like to ask each of you to briefly introduce yourself, share your role in this project, and then we’ll get into what the project itself is and what GovWallet is. So, Svyatoslav, why don’t we start with you?

Svyatoslav Senyuta: I’m leading government solutions in Central Europe, Middle East, and Africa in Visa. I’m based out of Dubai, and I’m responsible for any commercial engagements with government institutions and organizations. And a core task of my function at Visa is to ensure that we are helping the governments to go through the digital transformation journey and to ensure that we are reaching very high levels of financial and digital inclusion across all the markets.

Alex Perala: Nice to meet you Svyatoslav. I would also like to ask Rahul to introduce himself. A lot of our audience probably already knows who you are, Rahul, but can you introduce yourself for the newcomers?

Rahul Parthe: I’m the Co-founder, CTO and Chairman of TECH5. In our collaboration with Visa, the focus is being on building digital infrastructure. And I want to categorically say that it’s not an ID infrastructure, we are bringing a lot more things together. And as the function of Svyatoslav’s division is to bring government solutions, especially from the payments angle, what I’m doing in this context is working on the digital identity infrastructure part of it. With Visa we are tying the digital identity infrastructure together with the payment infrastructure, which enables the governments to not only  implement efficient delivery of government services, but also enable the enterprises in each country to build a digital infrastructure, which is based on self-sovereign identity principles. So, I’m focusing on building that vision and then the whole end-to-end offering for the governments.

Tony Bitzionis: Can you give us an explainer of what the GovWallet is?

Rahul Parthe: Digital identity is the buzzword. And most of the times when we go to talk to governments, they say that they want Digital ID, but if you really dig deeper, they often do not understand it in detail. This is where we go and explain them that digital ID in an isolation is pretty much meaningless. It has to be an infrastructure where the identity helps realize some use cases and helps the citizens to avail those services in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The GovWallet is a digital agent of an SSI-based wallet. In isolation it is just a wallet, but that’s not what we are offering. What we are offering is the entire infrastructure where we work with the governments to not only help them to provide the citizens with a wallet in hand or in virtual cloud, where they can hold their credentials, which could be identity credentials or payment credentials, but then also help the governments issue standards-compliant credentials from the trusted sources. We also help them to come up with governance policies, and rules of how to take it and implement as a framework. Those policies and frameworks are for financial, legal, commercial and technical aspects.

One of the key use cases is payments. When you are transacting with the digital ecosystem, you are always exchanging something. Most of the times it’s trust, but the biggest value transaction is money. And this is where we are working with Visa, and Visa has its own ecosystem of government solutions, enabling governments to do other programs.

Svyatoslav Senyuta: In principle, Visa as a business is entirely built on trust, and the entire digital ecosystem is built on trust. It is very important when you are working with governments, and there are lots and lots of different sensitivities. And when governments look at the core objectives in terms of digitization, they’re looking first and foremost on how to ensure digital inclusion and financial inclusion, as well as how to provide people with access to services.

Many people today across the globe are excluded to very big extent from being able to access public services, which are critical for their lives. They don’t have access to financial services, so they are excluded, in fact, from the financial system. So, we were looking for how to bring all these elements together for developing and underdeveloped countries. Many of those countries do not have even a national foundational ID. This is a problem, especially in Africa. More than 400 million people do not have foundational IDs. This is critical because if people do not have foundational IDs, they cannot access public services and many other things which are super important. So, in order to address it, we are working with more than 15,000 financial institutions and Fintech companies across the world.

Therefore, we started a strategic collaboration with TECH5 to find the ways to combine two extremely important elements. And, if people look at the formula of financial and digital inclusion, effectively it contains three core pillars. The first one is obviously the ID. And as everything is now moving to digital, digital ID becomes the best form factor. This is where all these processes are moving, and it helps to scale fast as well. The second pillar is digital payments. To make the ID functional, you need to add payment use cases that will be driving the usage. And the third pillar is all about automating processes and regulations.

If you bring these three elements together with the right strategy, it creates a great synergy. We have seen this happening in India with the Aadhaar system, giving significant boost in a very short term to such an immense population. We believe that the combination of those elements is very important, and the ID Wallet is very critical for payments. To ensure that all people have access to financial services, it is important to help the governments to leverage the ID rollout and combine it with provision of local government wallets, which will immediately open access to financial ecosystem.

The government wallets reduce the cost, the risk, and the inefficiency of legacy payment systems. In addition, government wallets give a full transparency and visibility and allow a government to improve the process in order to avoid identity-related fraud. The digital ID component is critical because the government needs to know to whom, for example, the government payment is made, like different types of social aid, social support, pensions, and so on.

For government disbursements, today the trend is just sending funds to bank accounts. People cash it out, and the effect of cashless economy is going down. Cash is still prevailing. But bringing in the wallet component and bringing it into digital domain will help the government understand how efficient their public disbursements are, because it adds a component of programmability. For example, if a government decides to make a payment for health support or education support, they can limit the way people can spend those funds. Additionally, they can give people access and ability to make the payments to the government, improving the way of collecting taxes, fees, fines, penalties, and so on. These instruments bring additional revenues to the governments and helping them to reinvest into their digital infrastructure.

A good example of such synergy and an efficient arrangement of the e-government ecosystem is Ukraine. It was kind of the start of government growth, with the goal of building an inclusive digital government ecosystem, or as they call it, a digital government in the smartphone.

Alex Perala: As both of you were talking, something finally clicked for me. When I first saw the news that TECH5 had partnered with Visa, I thought, that this is interesting, but why payments and ID together? But now it makes sense. And I also remember back to a couple of years ago, I read a book by the economist Stephanie Kelton, who was arguing that the whole basis of government in a way is building a financial relationship with citizens, whether it’s collecting taxes or giving them the means to spend money for healthcare and food. So, I’m not an economist, and I probably completely messed up her argument, but it clicked to me that payments are foundational for how we identify ourselves and relate to the government and relate to non-government entities like banks.

Your employer wants to know who you are, and they want a government official to tell them this. So, that all totally makes sense. And there is a million directions we could go with this, but one thing I want to clarify before we go further is what is the role of biometrics in the GovWallet, and in general what’s the approach to authentication? Because of course, the stakes of this are pretty high. It is serving a very important role, so you have to get authentication and identity. I guess, Rahul, this is probably for you. Please let us know what is the approach that is being taken here?

Rahul Parthe: This is a good question, and this is the basis of the whole discussion. The wallet itself acts as an onboarding endpoint. So, citizens are advised to download this government wallet, and then they can enroll themselves to get their digital verifiable credential from a trusted authority. And, depending on which government it is and what methods of proving the identity is used, the wallet allows citizens to capture their face or / and fingerprints, using the back and front camera of their phone. And then in some countries, there are reference databases to verify it against. Next, the issued credential gets pushed into the wallet. In some countries, the whole IDV process can be in place, where a citizen shows their identity card, takes selfie and a does liveness check, and so on. This is the beginning point for a citizen. They download the wallet, request a credential and receive it. In all of this, as the platform providers, neither TECH5, nor Visa ever holds the credentials. We do not have access to the PII or the information. It is all stored and processed in the central location where the government issues it, and then sends it to the wallet of the user. The role of biometrics is to first verify a person during the onboarding process or when they are getting the credential onto the wallet, and then verify them, for example, when they want to do an eKYC to open a bank account or apply for a credit card. In this case, the financial institution, with consent from the user, might require another biometric check.

With such technology, the eKYC process for the banks becomes like a single click. The GovWallet offers an interactive process where you just go through a few clicks, and by doing that, you can open a bank account literally in a few seconds.

The third role of biometrics comes into play when it is all about security and privacy. To improve security, verification methods can be configured depending on the risk of the transaction. For example, if it is a low-risk transaction, only a face verification is required, and if it is a high-risk transaction, face and fingerprints verification should be asked for. It is important to mention that no dedicated sensor is required to capture face and fingerprints – TECH5’s contactless biometrics acquisition system called T5-AirSnap allows for such capture using a standard front or back camera of a smartphone. In case if the transaction is of a highest risk, the user can configure to request for face, fingerprint and voice or pin code verification. All the matching is done on the device, so it can be controlled by the user.

The wallet comes with a feature that enables single sign-on and replaces the OTPs, which are very exposed to card swaps and other fraud. Now the same wallet could be used for logging into government services or private enterprises with a passkey-like mechanism. So, this is the fourth role of biometrics.

The fifth role would be in privacy. Biometrics and cryptography technologies of the wallet allow for selective disclosure and offline verification. For example, if I need to prove that I’m over 21, I can disclose only this part of data. And, when I show my identity, somebody also needs to make sure that it’s me and not my son bringing in the phone or the physical document. So, they could do a biometric verification on the spot, offline, without consulting any database.

So, the role of biometrics in this process is very large – from verification before the issuance of a credential to authentication and authorization for transactions.

Tony Bitzionis: Digital ID and digital government infrastructure are very important and impactful parts of this industry. We inevitably end up speaking about them for some amount of time each week, but whenever I am talking to a friend or a family member about what I do, this topic comes up and almost always the first question that they have is regarding privacy protection and how it’ll impact them and their privacy. So, my question is how has the GovWallet team approached the issue of privacy protection?

Rahul Parthe: We are pretty much sticking to the SSI principles. So, the credentials are between you and the issuer (the government), and then between you and the relying party. You can choose what you disclose to the relying parties using the selective disclosure. There are trust frameworks that ensure that you are not sharing your data with random people. The communication between you and the service provider is fully encrypted, peer-to-peer (P2P). Nobody in the world knows what is going on between you and the service provider, only the two of you. So, we are sticking to all the security and privacy principles, and the whole stack is built on the SSI principles.

We made sure that our solution is compliant with security standards and is privacy preserving. In fact, we improve security and privacy by providing technologies for offline verification.

Our goal is inclusion. And inclusion means that you need to deal with both, people who have smartphones, and those who don’t have smartphones. So, the solution that we are offering caters for both: people with smartphones or people without smartphones or features phones can equally participate in the digital transformation, using an agent model, where they go to an agent, go through biometric check, and so on. And there are certain measures in the ecosystem and the app that allow the agent not to exploit the person. This is of course not relevant to the western world, but for the parts in the world that we are working together with, it’s a very important option.

Svyatoslav Senyuta: I think that data privacy is obviously a critical element of the security of the ecosystem, and one of the primary objectives and goals for us is to ensure that everything is extremely secure and intuitive for the citizens, and effectively complies with the government regulations, which are different in every country. When we are getting into the process, we do product due diligence for the local requirements, and all the implementation goes within those requirements. It is important to mention that Visa does not store any information, and we want to ensure that, when we are building those ecosystems, the governments also have full confidence that they have and own all the biometric information and have full control over all the mechanisms of data and information flow within the systems.

We are providing governments with technology, vision, expertise and knowledge, which are quite unique as of today in the market because those synergies are just starting to happen. And I believe that we will see more of those different collaborations in the future.

Security is our core principle, and we make sure that there is an absolute compliance with all the requirements of all the markets we are working on.

Alex Perala: If you are enrolled with your phone, what happens if you lose your phone? Rahul mentioned that there are agents someone can go to and confirm their identity without a phone. So, is that the answer? To go to the bank or whatever the government has designated and say that you don’t know where your device is, but you still have your face and fingerprints and ask for access to your identity wallet. Is that how it would work?

Rahul Parthe: The answer is yes and no. If you lose a phone and you buy a new phone, there are mechanisms to recover your wallet and credentials. It is like requesting a backup. Or you can buy a new phone and start from scratch – download the wallet and request your credentials from the government. You have both options. What you are not losing is your identity. Your identity is still with the government that is issuing the credential, and you need to just request a credential. There is also another option where you can go to another agent and recover your wallet.

Another thing that I would like to mention is that many countries are writing data privacy and protection acts and policies. When Visa and TECH5 support these countries by providing their expertise and sharing the information on how to implement such solution and technology offering, it helps counties to speed up the implementation of these policies and make their ecosystems or digital infrastructure in compliance with the policies they write.

Many countries look for best practices from other countries, adopt it, but the technology needs to catch up and ensure that the regulatory policies are perfectly implemented. Our offering helps the governments to comply with what they’ve written in the law.

Alex Perala: There are certain parts of the world that are mobile-first, and some where there is an opportunity, and there is a leapfrog where West is ahead in this new digital paradigm. Visa – TECH5 is a new partnership, as it was only announced in December, and I would like to learn what kind of  engagement are you seeing so far from governments with the GovWallet, if any?

Svyatoslav Senyuta: We have lots of interactions today, it is several dozens of those. We see a great interest from the government to start addressing the challenges they have, starting from the markets where they don’t have foundational IDs and where we can bring in health ID and other solutions even in such a challenging environment, as well as bring a payment component to the health ID, which is functional. There are other use cases, like helping to distribute subsidies when, for example, the country is suffering from droughts, and many farmers need support from the government. We have been also reached out by many organizations globally, which are struggling to deliver humanitarian support to people. They are looking for the solution for the last-mile-problem: how to reach out to those people who really need this help, and without the ID component it is almost impossible.

Today it is effectively done through cash, vouchers, et cetera. As you may imagine, there is a huge cost to this and, I assume, quite a significant fraud as well. So, we bring those digital ecosystems in place for the government to streamline all these processes and eliminate fraud.

As an existing example of a similar program, I can again talk about the Ukrainian system. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, people were reluctant to vaccinate, and there was a government program on how to stimulate vaccination. The government was willing to pay 1,000 in a local currency, which was roughly $40 for each twice vaccinated person at that time. The government leveraged their e-government platform, which had digital ID, and they have ensured that in a very short time, like 2-3 month, they have opened more than 13 million government wallets and provided people with incentives. There were 2 objectives: to stimulate vaccination and to ensure the incentive money were only spent from those wallets and spent only on those sectors of the economy that suffered most from COVID – to ensure that the government is incentivizing citizens, but also that the funds are channeled back into the economy into specific sectors. It worked perfectly well as it was an extremely seamless experience. People were very happy because it was easy to receive and spend the money. At some point, people asked for another cluster like pharmacies to be opened for this program so that people can spend the funding at pharmacies as well. And it has been done in a matter of two or three days. This solution provided the government with reliable information and visibility about the development of the program and might help building better public policies in the future.

To ensure that such program is efficient, the government needs to provide two types of access – access to identity, because this is the cornerstone of any access to any government program, and access to payments, because everything is rotating around payments. Whenever you need to use public services, you need to pay. In most cases, whether you need to get any other services, it requires payments as well. And this is where we are bringing this amazing synergy for creating access to help and to uplift everyone everywhere in each corner of the world. And we are happy to do this.

Rahul Parthe: When we started to speak to the governments, they knew that they need digital identity, but it was not clear what it really means and where they have their primary focus. For example, financial inclusions work in isolation, as well as access control, e-government services, digital signatures, and so on. We went to these governments and told them that a citizen should be in the center of everything, and if they need to do, for example, four things, they should be able to do it from one place, and the government should approve their access to their identity, allowing them to access physical or digital spaces, financial transactions and attestations.

With our solution, we provide governments with technology and experience of such implementations, a roadmap, as well as the app that they can test and understand better. They see tangible things, as well as they see what the citizens would be really doing and how they will be receiving services – from receiving incentives to paying fines, all in a secure and private manner. And there will be no intermediary players who would receive and store any information – everything is done only between the user and the service provider.

The beauty of this solution is that everything can be implemented within three to six months, and they can start using it. This is an amazingly fast implementation compared to traditional identity infrastructure projects which might take years of investment and building. The reaction of governments, as you can imagine, is very positive and that they would like to implement it.

It has been an amazing journey. We only started working together with Visa in December, but the moment the teams started approaching governments, we started receiving and great level of appreciation for working as partners with governments, educating them, and demonstrating them that sovereignty of the data is guaranteed as they will not have any dependency on any foreign country for their IT infrastructure. We are ensuring inclusion and enabling their vision of a digital nation, and it is very appreciated. We are very pleasantly surprised with the number of contacts, meetings and interactions we already have with so many governments in the MENA region and around the world.

Svyatoslav Senyuta: I would like to add one comment about the customer centricity. So, if you look at developed countries in terms of digital infrastructure, there are a few countries that have amazing build outs. However, in order interact with the government, you need to download like 10 applications, and it is not as efficient as it could be. So, to make it more efficient, there should be one window, where, if you as a citizen need something, you go to the government and get the help you require through that single app.

I am also sure that in the future the government will be proactively reaching out to you. For example, if you are reaching a pension age, they will open you a pension ID that will be generated automatically and pushed to your government wallet. You can also have it as a verifiable document, but at the same time you will start automatically receiving your pension into your government wallet without a need to go anywhere for it. You will not need to go through eKYC, because your identity is already verified by the government, by the state itself. We will see those trends coming in as well. But the core is to avoid the fragmentation, but go through the consolidation of the digital assets and build customer-centric products for citizens.

Tony Bitzionis: I would like to ask how do these projects come about? It must be so complicated. What is it like working with governments on innovative project like this that there’s no real established playbook for. What is that experience like?

Svyatoslav Senyuta: Indeed, there is no playbook. And I think that we are one of the first few who are elaborating on this. The core factor here is a political will. If you look at the top three objectives of most of the governments, you will notice that digitization is one of them, and I think that this is a great commitment which is driven by the governments themselves. It’s being driven by multiple organizations in this market. And I think that we will see a big I would say revolution in the domain within the next five to seven years.

The level of infrastructure today is very different from country to country. Some countries are super sophisticated, and sometimes it is complicated to get into a discussion and suggest the right architecture to them. But what we see in general across many countries in terms of digital infrastructure, is that here is a large amount of effort we need to put in, and we are ready to do the heavy lifting. We are addressing all countries, no matter how many people are living there. And I believe that the most important thing is trust that we are building by working together with the governments. We have and share a big vision, helping them to meet their objectives in a very short time.

If there is a political will and commitment from the government, it can be happening really fast. And I can say that within the next six to twelve months we can see amazing things happening in the market. This solution changes everything for citizens – they need only their smartphones as everything is digital. This is the world where they can do literally any legally meaningful action like boarding planes or trains, paying for services and goods in a fully digital manner, getting access to physical and digital spaces, and so on. This creates a completely different lifestyle.

What we see is that the adoption of such solutions is really high. Before I was thinking that the adoption will depend on age, but believe it or not, it is not. For example, getting back to the Ukraine’s case, more than 25% of users of their digital government app are 55+ years old. So, I think that this is an intuitive digitization, where people don’t need to learn how to use it, but can just start using it because it is easy and intuitive. In this case everybody will use it daily, weekly, et cetera, because it’s nice and convenient.

Rahul Parthe: There is one statement I would just add is that the stack that we built for the governments has open architecture. The government does not have to solve all the problems at day one. They can first let the citizens get their IDs, then provide the most critical use cases, and then add more. Because it is an open architecture, the government can easily plug in use cases and workflows and add relying parties. This gives the comfort to the governments as they don’t have to wait until a fully ready plan and then go live. They can incrementally improve the system.

The adoption of the system will depend on how many use cases the government brings to the table. If the users will see that with one wallet they can do 10 different things, or a million different things, they will stick to it. It will also help to improve the happiness index of the citizens as well as their trust level to their government.

The post ID Talk: Why ID and Payments are Foundational to Digital Infrastructure, with Visa and TECH5 appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, makes its T5-OmniMatch ABIS Biometric Engine compliant with the identity-related categories of APIs of the OSIA ITU standard (ITU-T Recommendation) for the global infrastructure of information and communication technologies (ICT).

OSIA is an open set of interfaces (APIs), introduced by Secure Identity Alliance (SIA[1]), that enables seamless connectivity between all components of the identity management ecosystem – independent of technology, solution architecture or vendor hence make an identity management system interoperable and removes vendor lock. Since April 2024, OSIA has become an official standard (ITU-T Recommendation) of the International Telecoms Union (ITU[2]), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies (ICTs). This Recommendation describes a set of standardized application program interfaces (APIs) needed to connect the multiple building blocks of an identity management solution and is technically equivalent to the OSIA specifications.

The new version of T5-OmniMatch ABIS BE is compliant with two categories of APIs out of four, described in this recommendation: Population Registry (PR), managing key biographical information on individuals for the basis of ID cards and services, and Biometric System (ABIS), managing biometrics and authentication services. This compliance makes TECH5’s platform OSIA-ready to implement IDMS (Integrated Database Management System) and ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) into ID systems in the Telecom industry.

“Telecom is one of the key vertical markets for TECH5 globally. Compliance with the ITU-T Recommendation is a critically important component for success in our future projects in this field.” – comments Ameya Bhagwat, Chief Revenue Officer at TECH5.

“We ensure interoperability of our platforms and its compliance with open standards. Compliance with two of such open systems – OSIA and MOSIP – makes TECH5’s biometric matching platforms perfectly suitable for National ID projects around the world fostering interoperability without sacrificing the innovation of the proprietary technologies. We focus on enabling countries with reliable technologies and solutions allowing to build Foundational ID and Digital ID infrastructures based on the direction they choose.” – comments Rahul Pathe, Co-founder, Chairman and CTO at TECH5.

The post TECH5 Makes its Biometric Matching Platform Compliant with the Latest OSIA Telecom Standard appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

TECH5’s biometric and digital ID technologies are used by the Mauritanian Ministry of Digital Transition, Innovation and Public Sector Modernisation (MTNIMA) for its digital ID pilot project, with the aim of replacing passwords with biometrics for access to eGovernment services.

TECH5 won this digital ID pilot project in partnership with local integrator SmartMS through a tender published by MTNIMA and UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in June 2022. The companies provided a jointly developed software solution for digital onboarding and verification of citizens. This consists of identity verification (identity proofing) with auto-ident process[1]based on the NIST (National Institute for Standards in Technology) identity proofing and biometric verification, based on OpenID Connect flows, allowing for passwordless login into the Mauritanian eGovernment portal.

The solution includes the back-end system and the Identity Provider (IdP) developed by SmartMS, as well as TECH5’s technology platforms T5-OmniMatch Face BioSDK for facial biometric 1:1 matching, T5-AirSnap Face technology for facial biometrics capture using the camera of a mobile phone, T5-LDS facial liveness detection software, and T5-IDencode platform for the issuance of a digital ID stored in an encrypted 2D machine readable identity container – T5-Cryptograph – containing biometric and biographical data of the citizen that is used to perform decentralized biometric authentication as part of consent framework before sharing of personal information.

TECH5 has also provided MTNIMA with the mobile applications for the iOS and Android operating systems, allowing for biometric data capture and verification using a mobile phone. The apps have built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR)[2] and Near-field Communication (NFC)[3] technologies for document data reading and verification during digital onboarding.

Additionally, TECH5 shared its knowledge and contributed the source code of the customised solution developed for this pilot project, to MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform). “Our company is confidently investing in digital ID projects across the globe. We firmly believe that by promoting collaboration between governments, open-source solution providers, and creators of value-add technology, we can shape a more inclusive future for everyone”- says Co-founder, Chairman, and CTO of TECH5 Rahul Parthe. “The successful implementation of the solution is a testament to the exceptional combination of biometric and Digital ID technologies. Thanks to the cutting-edge advancements in this field, the citizens of Mauritania can now enjoy easy, fast, and secure access to eGov services.”

The pilot was successfully presented to MTMINA ministry’s employees on March 22nd, 2023, with more than 70 people testing the application on the first day of trials. During the digital onboarding, citizens are enrolled with their Mauritanian Passport or an ID card featuring contactless capability (issued after June 2022), using the mobile application. The document holder’s photo is biometrically verified by the app against the holder’s face and sent to the back-end system for digital ID creation. Once a digital ID in the form of a T5-Cryptograph is created, it is sent back to the holder and stored in their phone. For biometric verification, enabling access to the Mauritanian eGovernment portal, the user will be verified by face against their digital ID by taking a selfie when requested by the portal during login.

Leveraging the potential of digital technology and innovation for development is a key priority in Mauritania’s national development strategy[4].

“Through this pilot, we have successfully demonstrated secure and trusted identity proofing of test users as well as user authentication for e-government application.” – Commented Yehdhih Anna, Project Manager at SmartMS.

“We are proud to be part of this project contributing to the technological transformation of the country. Mauritania looks to be on track to become one of the first countries to adopt fully digital national ID biometrically linked to its holder.” –  Says Ameya Bhagwat, Chief Revenue Officer at TECH5.

The pilot project continued until October 1st, 2023, and the Mauritanian government have now released an app for its citizens called Houwiyeti (هويتي ), concretising the first steps of the digital Identity program of the Mauritanian government. This app is used to have access to various services based on biometric identification.

Learn more about this project

The post TECH5’s Technologies are Used by Mauritanian Government for its Digital ID Pilot Project Funded by UNDP appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, is announcing the availability of its new biometric template protection technology, fully compliant with the ISO 30136 standard. The technology will be available in TECH5’s multi-modal biometric matching system, T5-OmniMatch ABIS, for both 1:1 and 1:Nmodes, across all three biometric modalities – face, fingerprint and iris.

In biometric recognition systems, a template/feature is extracted from a biometric input (such as face, finger) and is matched with another template for identification and verification purposes. These templates, in most cases, contain privacy-sensitive information about the subject’s identity. With the growing adoption of biometrics across many domains and increasing concerns about privacy and security, it is imperative to ensure that biometric templates don’t reveal any personal identifiable information (PII) even if they are compromised. Hence, data protection regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consider biometric templates as sensitive data that must (legally) be protected. Several digital infrastructure initiatives that rely on digital identities have highlighted biometrics as being crucial for ensuring secure and user-friendly interactions between users and service providers. However, there is a cautious approach to adopting biometrics due to privacy and security concerns. Europe’s digital identity framework eIDAS is no exception. TECH5’s biometric template protection aims to alleviate these concerns and build trust in the technology among users.

Compliant to ISO 30136, TECH5’s proprietary biometric template protection scheme satisfies the four principal requirements:

• 1. Cancelability: an essential requirement, it is the capability to cancel or revoke compromised templates and issue new ones, similar to password resets. TECH5’s cutting-edge biometric template protection technology directly addresses this crucial need by providing the ability to cancel or revoke a protected biometric template and replace it with another protected template.
  2. Unlinkability: an often-overlooked aspect in biometrics, it guarantees that two protected templates of the same individual across different applications will not be related or linked. Users can establish distinct biometric protected templates per account, profile, or use case.
  3. Irreversibility: Engineered with irreversibility in mind, the technology makes it computationally extremely difficult or even impossible to recover the unprotected biometric template from a protected template.
  4. Accuracy: The biometric template protection technology is constructed on top of TECH5’s top-tier biometric algorithms and does not compromise the high matching accuracy, empowering customers to implement highly secure, flexible, and privacy-preserving large-scale biometric systems with minimal increase in hardware requirements.

This advanced multi-layered technology seamlessly fuses AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning and traditional methods to ensure robust template protection for both the entire database and individual users. This enables customers to implement centralized or decentralized authentication systems with equal protection. In the event of a database breach, new biometric-protected templates can be immediately deployed for the entire population, while in the case of an individual’s compromised biometric templates, the system can issue new protected templates based on the user’s PIN or passphrase input.

“Continuous innovation to achieve inclusion without compromising the security and privacy of the users is one of the founding principles at TECH5. Our biometric template protection technology prioritizes privacy while maintaining high accuracy to ensure both inclusion and security. This achievement is made possible through the exceptional collaboration of research scientists with expertise in biometrics and machine learning. As pioneers, we are among the foremost international providers of multimodal biometrics, offering this technology as an integral feature of flagship enterprise solutions like the ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System), tailor-made for large-scale deployments.” – Comments Rahul Parthe, Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO at TECH5.

Read in media

The post TECH5 Builds a Biometric Template Protection Technology for its Multi-Biometric Matching System appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.

SafetyDetectives recently conducted an insightful interview with Rob Haslam, the Chief Strategy Officer at TECH5. Rob shared his extensive experience in the biometric and digital identity market, highlighting TECH5’s innovative contributions to global biometric standards. With a focus on advancing technologies such as contactless fingerprint capture and secure digital credentials, TECH5 is at the forefront of ensuring secure and convenient identity verification. Rob also discussed the crucial role of AI in enhancing biometric technologies and provided a glimpse into the future milestones TECH5 aims to achieve.

Can you introduce yourself and talk about your role at TECH5?

My name is Rob Haslam, and I am the Chief Strategy Officer at TECH5. I am responsible for defining and executing our global strategy in the fast-evolving biometric and digital identity market. My role involves collaborating closely with other executives and department heads to align strategies company-wide, ensuring we are on the right path for growth. Additionally, I manage our investor relationships, both in terms of current investors and with a view to future investment rounds.

What are some of the flagship features of TECH5 and how it contributes to the development of global biometric standards?

In recent years, the biometric landscape has been changing rapidly. This has brought new technologies as well as new use cases. Biometrics has become a key to securing transactions and accessing online services, as well as digital and physical spaces.

TECH5 is at the forefront of developing new technologies to support these use cases, constantly investing in innovation and the design of software platforms for governments and enterprises. A great example of such innovation is our contactless fingerprint capture technology – T5-AirSnap Finger. It allows for detection, capture, quality assessment, and enhancement of fingerprint images within seconds using a smartphone’s built-in camera. It also runs a liveness check to ensure that the data is taken from a real person. This technology is widely used during digital onboarding and remote identity verification by banks, telcos, and governments, allowing for biometric data acquisition without using expensive purpose-built fingerprint scanners. It works in both remote and assisted modes. Contactless fingerprint capture is quickly becoming a new standard and bringing such benefits as convenience and reduced total cost of ownership.

Another important direction in which TECH5 innovates is secure credentials. Digital identity is becoming ever more important, as technology evolves to serve post-COVID use cases, pushing the world towards a new digital-first era. Governments in different countries are actively developing standards for digital identity to ensure data protection and interoperability, and TECH5 is very active here.

At TECH5, we started working on digital ID technologies before the pandemic, and our first biometric-powered platform allowing for the issuance and management of secure credentials – T5-IDencode – was launched in 2020. Back then, we introduced a digital data container – T5-Cryptograph – that can store biometrics and demographic data in an encrypted format, allowing the linking of an identity holder to a physical or digital credential biometrically. Today, this technology is used in various countries and meets all key international requirements.

Later, witnessing the transition to digital IDs but knowing that physical credentials will stay with us alongside digital ones for at least another decade, we also launched T5-FaceLink – a biometric security feature for the protection of facial images on printed identity documents from alteration or substitution. We believe that it is key to create biometric technologies protecting both physical and digital credentials to embrace inclusion.

Today, we are working on several more biometric platforms and offerings that we hope will be widely used and set new standards in the biometric technology world. But in this interview, I would like to talk about one key biometric function – multi-modal matching.

The use of multi-modal biometric matching platforms fosters inclusion and reduces fraud in national-scale projects, becoming one of the requirements to ensure efficient identification, de-duplication, and verification of citizens. Multi-modal ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) platforms can work with national biometric databases with face, fingerprint, or iris data, and identify or verify a person using several biometric modalities at the same time. TECH5 has offered tri-modal matching systems since its inception and has proven their efficiency in some of the world’s largest national ID projects. Our matching technology is at the heart of the world’s second-largest such program, in Indonesia, for example, where more than 220 million people’s data (1 face, ten fingers and two iris images per citizen) supports a variety of government and commercial use cases. TECH5 does not hold this data; rather, our technology enables its rapid and accurate matching as required. This sovereign data is always in the custody of the Indonesian government.

How does regular benchmarking contribute to the advancement and reliability of your biometric technologies?

Technologies should not be created in a vacuum. It is important to regularly participate in various independent tests to compare your technologies with those of other market-leading companies. The algorithms used across all three biometric modalities of TECH5 are consistently ranked top-tier by authorities such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, under the US Department of Commerce). We also participate in various tests with labs like iBeta to ensure the quality of our technologies. This helps us to ensure that we provide our partners and customers with best-in-class technologies.

It is also important to benchmark new technologies, such as fingerprint liveness detection. With only a few available on the market, it is crucial to test and compare these technologies to improve them. TECH5’s latest neural network-based fingerprint liveness detection technology for mobile devices won first and second positions in the Liveness Detection (LivDet) 2023 Non-contact Fingerprint international competition, successfully detecting all spoofing attacks. This achievement, among others, demonstrates our technological excellence.

What role does biometrics play in the future of mobile payments and banking?

Today, biometrics already play a crucial role in preventing fraud and protecting customers’ data in many use cases, including banking and fintech. Facial biometric capture and matching technologies have been used for quite some time already for digital onboarding and verification to provide access to financial services such as digital payments, loans, signing of bank documents, and more. Now, with the arrival of new technology for fingerprint capture and verification using mobile devices, this biometric modality is also available for remote onboarding and matching, ensuring ease, high speed, and accuracy of data capture and verification. Adding fingerprints to existing workflows can also offer differentiated authentication, such as for higher-value transactions.

With our digital ID technologies powered by biometrics, P2P transactions and other financial operations become secure and easy: the digital IDs of payers and payees are linked to them biometrically, ensuring the legitimacy of transactions and thus enhancing trust.

Talking about the future, together with our partners, we are working on the joint development of next-generation digital identity solutions powered by SSI-based Digital Identity Wallets and trust services to build a digital public infrastructure that serves any use case that requires identity proving, access control, authentication and authorization, and payments. We are starting with a specific focus on government payment digitization. This innovation will help to ensure secure, fast, and easy transactions.

We have been getting a lot of attention relating to our strategic partnership with Visa. Visa has big ambitions in the payment space in emerging markets, and linking biometrically backed digital identities to payment transactions will create powerful new platforms in under-served parts of the world where billions of people are yet to reap the benefits of digitization.

How does artificial intelligence (AI) complement biometric technologies?

TECH5 has been an AI-based company since its inception in 2018. All our major offerings were developed using AI and we continue to expend significant resources in researching AI-based enhancements and innovations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) significantly improves the speed and accuracy of biometric algorithms. AI-based algorithms can process and analyze vast amounts of biometric data more rapidly and precisely than traditional methods. Moreover, AI’s ability to learn and adapt allows biometric systems to become more robust over time, accommodating changes in physical appearance and environmental conditions.

Initially applied to facial capture and matching, AI is now used for fingerprint, iris, voice, and other modalities. Among the benefits of AI-based algorithms I would highlight reduced template size, which leads to a lower cost of ownership, and the ability to quickly and accurately capture different types of biometric data, such as facial and fingerprint images, using a mobile phone or tablet’s camera.

Another and one of the most important enhancements to biometric technologies made possible by AI is liveness detection. This ensures that a real person provides their biometric data, preventing spoofing attacks. This technology also exists for different biometric modalities, such as face, fingerprints, voice and others.

Looking ahead, what is the next big milestone in biometrics you are aiming for?

One of the milestones we are aiming for in improving our biometric algorithms is achieving a zero-error rate for all our biometric modalities. Our technologies are among the fastest and most accurate in the world, but reaching a point where a biometric system achieves perfect accuracy – meaning no false positives or false negatives – represents a significant next step for all technology companies, including TECH5. This is critically important because biometric systems are used in high-security contexts such as border control, financial transactions, and access to sensitive information or facilities. Achieving a zero-error rate would ensure the highest level of security and trust, preventing unauthorized access and avoiding the inconvenience and potential harm of legitimate users being falsely rejected. Furthermore, it enhances user confidence and system reliability, which are crucial for the widespread adoption and integration of biometric technologies in various applications, thereby fostering inclusion.

We are also planning to include more biometric modalities in our matching platforms. This will allow us to have a highly flexible system capable of working with any database.

Finally, it is not only the excellence of biometric technologies that is important but also their application. We see the future of biometrics in digital identity and believe that our key role is in enabling digital infrastructure powered by biometrics. This infrastructure will provide people with access to services and enable transactions both within a country and around the world.

Read in media

The post Interview with Rob Haslam – Chief Strategy Officer at TECH5 appeared first on TECH5: Innovative Identity Management Technologies.