NewTech Friday: Secure Citizen – Keeping ahead of fraudsters with biometrics
Dalene Deale, Executive Head at Secure Citizen, describes how her company is locking out fraudsters to protect both businesses and consumers.
Dalene Deale, Executive Head at Secure Citizen, describes how her company is locking out fraudsters to protect both businesses and consumers.
What led to the creation of Secure Citizen?
With the rise of data breaches globally, the traditional ways of verifying the identity of an individual lost its efficacy. In Southern Africa, the increase of impersonation fraud from 2019 to 2020 was a staggering 337%. Fraudsters use information that has been breached to impersonate a victim for the purposes of account creation and account takeover. Putting the victim and the companies that they defraud at a loss, not only financially, but emotionally for the victim and with brand damage consequences for companies. It also breaks down the trust between businesses and customers. Data breaches and syndicates working together have made it easier for fraudsters to impersonate consumers for nefarious reasons, be that online or in the physical world. Secure Citizen was created to recreate trust and enable businesses and consumers, with the use of innovation.
Could you present Secure Citizen's offer?
Southern African Fraud Prevention Services (SAFPS), a Not-for-Profit Organization in South Africa, partnered with OneVault, a biometrics company with more than a decade of voice authentication experience to start a business called Secure Citizen. The aim was to create a solution that enables biometric identity verification, currently offering voice, face and fingerprint. These can be used as a bundle or modularly, depending on the use case and the need of the customer.
We offer businesses an orchestration layer with APIs to ensure seamless integration. Our orchestration layer acts like a digital highway, connecting businesses to services such as biometric verification, proof of address, confirmation of business information (CIPC data), and also the ability to biometrically verify the directors of the business. Our solution enables businesses to be POPIA and GDPR compliant while removing the need to collect physical paper (such as certified copies of IDs). We have audit trail functionality to validate that identities were verified against the Golden Sources (being the Department of Home Affairs and SAFPS databases). This allows us to not only verify the identity but also advise whether the individual is a known victim or fraudster.
At the heart of our solution is the consumer. Secure Citizen doesn’t just operate as the Digital Identity arm of SAFPS, but we create a ecosystem where the data doesn’t belong to the company verifying the information and the data also doesn’t belong to Secure Citizen. It always remains the property of the consumer. Every interaction involving biometric verification can only take place with the active participation (and therefore consent) of the citizen themselves.
What's coming next for Secure Citizen?
We have successfully implemented Secure Citizen into a retailer that uses it for “Pay with face”, with payment enablers for merchant account creation and even a student digital bank. We are currently rolling out contactless delivery with a large global logistics company and we are also going live with a direct to consumer Secure Citizen solution. This will enable citizens to check their own information at the Department of Home Affairs without needing to call and hold for an agent and also enable person to person verifications. Bidorbuy was the first marketplace to implement Secure Citizen, but we would like to enable any marketplace, including dating sites, to enable citizens to verify that the person they are engaging with really is who they claim to be.
We are also creating the ability to enrol foreign nationals; we already provide access to the National Immigration Information System (NIIS) via API, this caters for refugees and asylum seekers. We aim to have the ability to verify the identity of non-South African citizens with authentication of passports matched with facial biometrics. This will enable businesses to ensure that the person that they are engaging with every time is the same individual and has a valid passport.
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