Mitek and Digidentity have securely scaled operations to enable faster onboarding of those registering with GOV.UK Verify.

Working together, the digital identify verification firms ensured processing speeds of up to 400 applicants per minute to accommodate the growing need for UK nationals and residents to apply for government services during the pandemic.

More than one million new GOV.UK Verify accounts have been created since 16 March, giving access to 22 government services, including Universal Credit applications, business and self-employed payments, car registration, tax services and pension queries.

“Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise in demand for GOV.UK Verify registrations, with successful applications peaking at 164,672 new profiles per week,” said Dick Dekkers, technology director at Digidentity. “To meet this need, we worked tirelessly to scale up our digital verification solution to ensure applicants could register faster, without compromising on safety."

Mitek and Digidentity’s technology ensures GOV.UK Verify users’ identities are securely verified at the point of application, to help stamp out any potential fraud.

Using a government-issued identity document, the workflow requires users to submit a copy of the ID document alongside a selfie to verify their identity. Mitek’s machine learning algorithm is then used to perform automated authentication checks, which fall back to human-assisted forensic checks for more complex cases.

Each identity has to be confirmed and verified in its own right, based on the information provided by each person, in near real time.

At the same time, not all genuine IDs can be checked automatically, as some do not conform to modern document standards and there can be inconsistencies in document images, as well as limited data-capture technologies.

The ever-increasing sophistication of criminal forgeries mean that fraud detection technology needs to constantly evolve and improve. The data provided is matched against authoritative sources like government databases and global organisations, including Interpol.

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