Gartner Mentions Regula as an Essential Provider for Document Centric Identity Proofing

Regula was mentioned in the 2022 Gartner® report “Buyer’s Guide for Identity Proofing”* as an example of a vendor that covers all the essential steps of the identity proofing process. This guide was created by Gartner’s analysts to help security and risk management leaders better understand the nuances of identity proofing that various vendors introduce to the market and consequently make a balanced decision when choosing ID verification solutions. Previously, Regula was named a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® report “Market Guide for Identity Proofing and Affirmation”** in 2022.

To mitigate online identity fraud, the Gartner Buyer’s Guide suggests organizations set a document-centric identity proofing process that is commonly known as “ID plus selfie.” This concept includes five consecutive steps: document image capture, document assessment, document data extraction, selfie image capture (with checks to eliminate a presentation attack), and face comparison. As per the report, each step has its own characteristics, and Gartner highlights them to help businesses better navigate the ID verification market.

We suggest contemplating various features that define the quality and usability of the identity proofing process at each step and therefore have an impact on your overall service and user experience.

In the document-centric approach, identity proofing starts with document image capture. As easy as it sounds, this step should not be taken for granted. It’s the beginning of the verification journey and it could very well be the point at which a person decides to go on or to quit the whole procedure. The Gartner guide states, “Across the surveyed vendors, the average percentage of users who needed to capture a second document image was 7%.” That’s a good low rate. However, Regula has managed to lower it down further, to 5%, thanks to our advanced document capture and image quality assessment technologies, which help users take perfect pictures of their IDs.

Once the document is captured, the authenticity assessment process begins. Here, Gartner recommends businesses pay attention to the vendor’s document database. We think this might be the most important criterion when it comes to assessing the depth and quality of ID verification. For example, Regula owns and maintains a document template database that contains over 12,000 templates of various IDs from 248 countries and territories: the world’s largest such database. What does this mean in terms of business? First of all, your ID verification needs are most likely covered, as our software is instantly able to recognize and analyze nearly all the documents in the world, including the rarest ones. But even more importantly, you’ll get the most comprehensive and precise verification, because this deep knowledge of documents is what helps us understand what to look for to prove the authenticity of an ID or to spot a forgery.

Also, for this stage, Gartner points out several checks and technologies that add assurance to the identity proofing process. Among the most important ones is document RFID chip reading and verification. “Of the surveyed vendors, 84% also offer capabilities to leverage an NFC-enabled smartphone to read ICAO 9303-compliant RFID chips in identity documents. This is considered the highest-assurance method of assessing a document,” say the Gartner analysts. We totally agree: that’s why we introduced complete server-side RFID chip verification that helps ensure the information in the physical ID is trustworthy and the chip is not cloned or its data manipulated. With smartphone-based verification, the authenticity of the chip and its data can’t be guaranteed since there is a risk of the verification results being intercepted and modified by fraudsters directly on the same device.

When you proceed to document data extraction, it’s critical to automate the process in order to eliminate human error and expedite verification. At this stage, language support plays a key role. According to the Gartner Buyer’s Guide, “Of the vendors surveyed, 38% supported only Latin script, whereas the rest supported OCR for scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Japanese.” Regula supports 95 languages, including 38 non-Latin scripts.

Then comes the “plus selfie” stage, in which a person is asked to take a self-portrait and (something that is becoming more and more important) undergo a liveness check to prove they are a real person, not a fraud attack attempt. According to Gartner, “The average selfie retake rate cited by the surveyed vendors was 3%.” But Regula performs even better: thanks to our detailed guidance during the selfie process, the chances that a person has to retake their photo are close to 0%.

Finally, it’s crucial to carry out face comparison to prove that the person in the document and in the selfie is the same. Regula solutions employ intelligent biometric verification technologies and make it possible to search for similarities between different pictures. This helps companies prove the identity of a client, taking into consideration that their photos may differ depending on their age, hairstyle, and so on. Furthermore, searching for similarities also helps spot fraud, as it highlights the person’s unique facial features regardless of any possible attempts to disguise themselves.

For more nuances that are worth paying attention to when choosing an ID verification provider, consult the detailed Gartner report “Buyer’s Guide for Identity Proofing”.

*Gartner, Buyer’s Guide for Identity Proofing, Akif Khan, 1 November 2022.
**Gartner, Market Guide for Identity Proofing and Affirmation, Akif Khan, 2 March 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.