Maza Makes U.S. Financial Services Securely Accessible for Immigrants with Regula Document and Biometric Verification

Maza Financial is a fintech company that enables new immigrants to the U.S. to gain access to foundational financial services quickly and securely. The company assists newcomers with obtaining an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), which allows them to get health insurance, driver’s licenses, and more while waiting for their Social Security Number (SSN). Maza's main goal is to make U.S. essential services accessible to everyone, regardless of their origin.

Challenge

The core part of Maza’s services is the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which helps verify the identities of thousands of the company’s clients, mostly Latino, or Spanish-speaking population. For this purpose, Maza implemented a special technology from a digital identity verification (IDV) solutions provider.

However, the company faced a number of issues with its KYC process. The IDV solution Maza employed generated too many false negatives and positives, did not give enough control over the IDV process and created limitations for customer experience.

All of this led Maza to seek a more controlled and reliable IDV solution. Additionally, the company required wide support for foreign IDs as long as its customers came from every corner of the world. Plus, Maza was interested in reducing onboarding costs since the number of its customers kept rising.

Solution

After extensive market research, Maza partnered with Regula to implement a single-vendor comprehensive IDV solution covering document and biometric verification. The set of Regula Document Reader SDK and Regula Face SDK met Maza’s requirements both in technology and price and allowed them to build a robust identity verification system.

Thanks to the implementation of Regula’s solutions, the identity verification process for Maza’s customers is now straightforward and efficient: a person just scans their ID and takes a selfie. All is done in mere seconds, and a new client gets access to the whole variety of Maza’s services.

During these seconds, Regula’s technologies perform a lot of work. Regula Document Reader SDK automatically identifies the document type, reads data from all fields, including visual zone, machine-readable zone (MRZ), and barcode, verifies the authenticity of the personal data and the document itself, and cross-checks all information to detect any inconsistencies or alterations that may indicate fraud.

Regula Document Reader SDK is backed by Regula’s proprietary and most comprehensive identity document template database, which is capable of recognizing and verifying a great variety of IDs from 250 countries and territories.

After document scanning, Regula Face SDK starts biometric verification. The solution matches a person’s selfie with their portraits in the documents to prove the person is the same. Also, Regula Face SDK performs the so-called liveness check to ensure that the company is onboarding a real live person, not a fraudster who uses masks, video injections, or screen replays.

Result

Implementation of Regula's solutions took just six weeks, and Maza significantly improved their KYC processes.

The benefits include:

• 50% reduction in cost per customer onboarding, which has made the process more affordable and efficient;
• improved document verification and liveness checks, which has reduced the number of verification issues;
• enhanced user experience, which has eliminated friction.

Our cooperation with Regula enabled Maza to adapt swiftly to the needs of our growing customer base. The robust and reliable identity verification system built with Regula Document Reader SDK and Face SDK has significantly improved our onboarding process, reducing costs and enhancing the overall user experience. As a result, we can now focus on higher-value tasks and improve customer satisfaction.

—Siggy Bilstein, CTO & Co-founder at Maza Financial