Identity, Security Program Controls/Technologies

Cross-border money movement gets more secure, reducing fraud in onboarding, authentication

A man walks past a currency exchange office on May 5, 2022, in Istanbul. (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

As the immigrant community in the United States has grown and e-commerce has become more global, so too have the amount of payments sent overseas to individuals and businesses — a fact that cyber-thieves have noted and followed.

However, targeting both the onboarding process and identity verification has helped at least one payments company reduce its fraud significantly. Chipper Cash is a San Francisco-based payments company, with more than 4 million users, which enables people to send funds online domestically and overseas, like a digital Western Union.

Working with London-based authentication company Onfido, Chipper Cash was able to reduce its time to securely onboard new customers and to verify the identity of new customers. According to Onfido, Chipper Cash was able to reduce time to onboard new customers by 35% through artificial intelligence-based identity verification, and able to automate customer authentication by 95%.

Chipper Cash customers validate identification through a photograph of government-issued identity document. Onfido first checks that the ID is genuine and then matches it to the user’s face, using AI. This process checks that the person presenting the identity is its legitimate owner and is physically present.  

“Partnering with Onfido has helped us deliver a premium onboarding experience for new customers while enabling us to meet strict [know your customer] requirements,” Hasan Luongo, vice president of global marketing at Chipper Cash, said in a prepared release. “The sheer scale of Onfido’s identity verification has accelerated our strategic growth targets, supporting over 40,000 identity checks daily.”

Alex Valle, chief product officer at Onfido, said in a prepared release: “A simple user experience is expected when sending and receiving money in today’s digital world. Making the identity verification process as frictionless and secure as possible is a critical component of this.”

“We enable businesses like Chipper Cash to scale and comply with regulations while detecting and preventing identity fraud,” Valle said.

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