Touchless ID

76% of population in Mexico, 84% of population in Columbia, 88% of population in Brazil don’t have access to formal credit systems. They receive loans at a very high interest rate - if they are able to secure them at all.  These people use paper-based identity documents that are sometimes lost or damaged and that seemed untrustworthy. Identity issuance alone does not solve the problem. Identity must be useable when and where it is needed.  Biometrics is the best way to ensure user identity. Touchless ID allows the citizens to take a picture of all their 10 fingers using a smart phone camera and securely extract the fingerprints. These prints are compatible with the Government national id databases. Our solution enables the vulnerable people to establish their identity and be part of the global financial eco system. Financial inclusion transforms their lives.

Businesses and governments are increasingly demanding ways to authenticate citizens remotely using mobile phones to increase reach, reduce cost, minimize fraud and ensure new digital service adoption. Our Touchless ID solution integrates directly with the service providers to allow the individuals to establish their identity at the point of service. For the billions blocked out of formal financial system due to lack of identity verification, this represents a transformational digital public good. Touchless ID solutions can be implemented without changing the existing programs or system. As such, our solution therefore helps the vulnerable people establish their identity securely and safely using an Android phone. 

We offer multi factor authentication from any mobile device with a camera, and we are based on touchless biometrics, that means we extract the user identity through a picture of a user’s fingers. Our processed biometric templates are compatible with Government biometric databases, such as NIDA in Tanzania, INE in Mexico, RENIEC in Peru, AADHAAR in India etc.  Our technology allows the citizens to send all ten fingerprints to a central database for identity verification. One of the most critical features is our liveness protection, making sure that the solution cannot be spoofed with pictures or videos, allowing only real fingers to be processed. Our technology is highly secure, patented and based on AI and Deep learning. We don’t store any data and our solution runs locally on the device (privacy by design). Our technology eliminates the need for special Hardware devices. Also, the current HW based solutions send one fingerprint data at a time for verifications and the error rate is very high (> 18%). We reduce the error rate significantly (< 3%) as we use multiple fingers.

In developing economies, most identity systems are not digitally enabled. Establishing digital identity is the first step of financial inclusion. Our technology is aimed at helping vulnerable people in developing countries.

We believe our solution is the simplest way to establish user identity against a central database. Upon Government approval, people who live in countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi and etc. can easily establish their identity and avail themselves to systems and services that will allow them to come out of poverty. To illustrate this, let us consider a use case in Mexico. Mexico has a national ID program called “INE”. We work with a pensions fund management company. They manage more than 1 million pensioners across the country. Before they implemented our solution, the pensioners have to travel to a local office every time they want to make changes to their pension plans including fund transfer. The pensioners were spending anywhere between $2-5 every time they visited a local branch. Most of the pensioners make at least one fund transfer request once a month. Last year, the pension fund company had launched a mobile based agent model (more than 2000 agents) to cover all the pensioners. Thanks to your solution,  the young agents go and serve these pensioners rather than having them make the trips to their branches. This had a huge positive impact on the business as well as the pensioners who have since then encouraged other pensioners to switch to this pension plan. 

More than a billion people are not able to establish their digital identity even though they have some form of identity. As these people cannot  establish their digital identity, they do not have access to formal credit systems. Our mobile based software solutions enable these people to establish their identity remotely against a central database. Programs like KIVA can now issue credits to these people at attractive interest rates. One smart phone with internet connection is more than sufficient to identify hundreds of people in a village and in turn we will empower hundreds of villages and billions of people.

Currently our product is being used in countries like Mexico, Columbia, Peru Brazil, Dominican Republic, Argentina, South Africa and Tanzania. Banks, pension funds, Micro finance companies, Telcos and Govt agencies use our product. Our business model is subscription-based. Our go to market strategy is to work with local partners, system Integrators and resellers. Currently, we perform more than 6 million transactions per month.

Current methods of establishing identity in most of the developing world require in-person interactions between the citizen and the financial institution officer and their equipment. The capacity and output of citizen verification is gated by the personnel budget of the financial institution. The resulting long wait times and interaction timeframe is not only a poor reflection of the financial institution, but also an opportunity for super-spreading of viruses and diseases in the current ongoing environment of the pandemic. Our solution addresses these interrelated issues to create a modern, scalable, high throughput, lower risk environment which ensures a positive experience for the citizen, and a controlled environment for the financial institution.

Our approach provides advantages in several aspects of digital on boarding of citizens: first, a self-service app used by the citizen distributes the time-intensive work of gathering citizen information, saving large amounts of time from in-person queued interaction with a bank officer; second, the ability to use a touchless surface – the smart phone’s camera, and a banking agent’s phone (for verification) – to gather the biometrics eliminates the possibility of communicating disease agents across citizens through high touch surfaces presently used for fingerprint capture.

Currently we are serving 3 million people.

In 2022, we will serve 9 million people.

In 2023, we will serve 18 million people.

In 2024, we will serve 36 million people.

In 2025, we will serve 54 million people.

In 2026, we will serve 81 million people.

We want to be part of the process to end poverty in all its form everywhere. Poverty can be eliminated by allowing the people to have access to credit. To access credit, people should be able to establish their identity easily. As a first step towards the identity verification, we are focusing on countries that have a national id program in place. We are allowing the vulnerable people to establish their identity remotely to get loans at a much lower rate. Just to give an example, we are working with Gentera (biggest micro finance bank in South America) in Mexico. Representatives of Gentera carrying smartphones are now a familiar sight on the streets of Ecatepec, Guadalajara and other towns throughout Mexico. These reps are a mobile powerhouse which can quickly verify a prospective customer using our mobile technology and approve a loan without ever walking into a bank branch. We are establishing partnership with similar organizations to empower people to get access to credit and improve their lives.  Our technology allows the citizens to establish their identity securely using the mobile phone anywhere, anytime. This is how we measure our progress towards of impact goal of ending poverty everywhere.

Full time : 20

Contractors: 10

Antony Vendhan is one of the Co Founder  at Touchless ID. Antony grew up in a small village called Vadakkankulam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadakkankulam). His dad borrowed money at very high interest rates to meet the monthly expenses. Life was difficult. Antony did his Electrical engineering and went to US and worked for companies like Netflix and Yahoo. He built scalable products at Netflix and Yahoo. He likes to solve problems. He always had plans to build something that will impact people living under poverty. He stumbled upon this idea in 2018 when he applied for his aadhaar card in 2018. Antony saw a huge opportunity to enable access to credit to the vulnerable people who borrow money at a very high interest rates. 

Jesus Aragon grew up in a farm. He went on to do his MBA at Instead/Wharton. Jesus was instrumental in taking Audience IPO and he executed Agnitio’s (a voice biometric company) divesture. As part of his MBA program, he spent few months with Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and he understands the needs of poor people. Jesus executes really well.

Marta Gomar is CTO of Touchless ID. Marta’s parents can’t talk and she was the founding member of Agnitio. She wants technology to be the voice of the voiceless people. She also spent 9 months in Africa educating girl children.

Marta, Antony and Jesus are committed to eliminate poverty from the globe leveraging technology and they have put together an amazing team to execute this.

One of the fundamental principles of Touchless ID is inclusion and diversity. Antony Vendhan, one of the co founder is Indian and Jesus the other co founder is Espanic. Mara Gomar (she/her) is our CTO and she is also Espanic. 

We have a team of 10 women data analysts working from Vadakkankulam. This amazing women team does a fantastic job and we will continue to build this team.

Solve can help generate exposure for Touchless ID and mobile biometrics verification with governments who are the primary implementers of digital identity initiatives. We believe Touchless mobile biometrics can help the vulnerable people in India, Pakistan and Indonesia. Solve can guide us to influence the Government agencies to accept our software product.

Keys to the solution:

Barrier 1: Fear of new technologies

Solution 1: Education about new solutions that are tried and tested.

Barrier 2: Compliance requirements

Solution 2: Generate political will to accept software-based solutions.

Barrier 3: Touchless ID’s size (Too small for country level projects) 

 Solution 3: Education about Touchless ID’s commitment towards digital identity and our track record delivering on our promises.

Touchless ID was started to help the Indian population. Aadhaar, the foundational id program gave an identity to more than 90% of the Indian population. The basic purpose of the Aadhaar program is to financially include the people who are under served. More than 400 Million bank accounts got opened due to the Aadhaar initiative. It still does not allow the people to get access to credits because of the following reasons:

-High sales cost

- No Digital Identity

- High transaction cost

The first step of financial inclusion is to establish the digital identity. Our technology will allow the people to establish their identity when they want and where they want. Aadhaar does not allow our software-based technology. We need help in convincing the Government that the technology is safe, secure and it is working in other countries. They need to certify our product with Level 0 certifications (similar to a touch based HW scanner). We need help to promote our technology in Pakistan as well as Indonesia. 

We would like to collaborate with MIT faculty to establish the security credibility for the product. Our products are ISO 30107-3 compliant (presentation attack detection). The product can’t be spoofed with papers, print outs, videos, image morphs, molds and so on. We don’t store any data locally. Finger capture is done in memory and data is encrypted in memory. Once the processing is complete, the entire memory is flushed. 

 Governments and organizations are worried that the middle men will collect the vulnerable people’s finger images and they will try to spoof the system. We need support from institutions like MIT to confirm that our solution is really secure and it can not be spoofed.

Refugees are one of the most vulnerable people in the world. Touchless ID’s Face AI product could be used to enroll more than 100,000 refugee data on a single Android phone. The data will be encrypted and stored locally. The verification process will take 3 seconds to identify a refugee in the camp. Our solution will enable the agencies to provide a dignified, fast, simple, and rigorous method of cash delivery to financially included refugees.

The rapid, worldwide spread of Coronavirus has put hygiene and the control of contagious diseases at the forefront of the minds of many. Most of the refugee inclusion programs use biometric verifications.

The most widely used biometric recognition devices are fingerprint readers. Traditional fingerprint readers require a user to physically place their finger onto the biometric sensor.

The single biggest cause of disease transmission is based on what we touch, the germs we leave behind and the germs we pick up from what other people have touched. This means that any touch-based biometric reader could become the very epicenter for the spread of disease. During these times, we won't allow our loved ones to touch a HW scanner as the scanner could become the very epicenter for the spread of disease. A simple, safe and secure verification is possible with our touchless mobile biometrics solutions and we are qualified for Andan’s prize. 

We will use the prize to build solutions to enroll and verify 1M people on a smartphone under 5 secs.

In developing economies, most identity systems are not digitally enabled. The burden is placed on the poor and vulnerable population to use paper based identity documents that are often lost, damaged or incomplete and that seemed untrustworthy.

Simply put, identity issuance is insufficient. Identity must be useable when and where it is needed.

Touchless ID bridges this gap. It enables the citizens to establish their identity using their smart phones. Touchless ID wants to improve the current solutions even further.  We propose a verifiable identity credentials that are stored locally on the citizen owned phones.

Identity should be available on all phones so that the billions of vulnerable people can securely and easily establish their identity. Touchless ID will use the funds to build a new solution using the PKI infrastructure and W3C standards to securely establish the identity using only the phone without having to call upon the issuers.

During enrolment, the citizen’s fingerprint data is collected, encrypted and sent to the citizen’s mobile phone as SMS messages. During any identity verification process, the fingerprints are compared to the fingerprints stored on the phone. Touchless ID solution integrates directly with the service providers to allow the individuals to access their identity credentials at the point of service.

For the billions blocked out of formal financial system due to lack of identity, this represents a transformational digital public good.

The proposed solution will be implemented without changing the existing systems or programs.