Scale up to 120.000 digital onboardings a day

Easier, quicker, and more secure

Digidentity makes online identification easier, quicker and more secure. They enable safe digital communication between individuals and the government. Seven years ago Digidentity was one of the parties that were allowed to deliver their services for the GOV.UK Verify Programme. Nowadays, they are the only identity provider left that can handle the complicated regulations in the UK for verifying identities. The COVID pandemic had tremendous influence and still has everywhere in the world. As a consequence, the UK GOV Verify Programme grew enormously. They needed to scale up as quickly as possible for their on-demand identity verification services. ReadID allowed them to do so.

The challenge

The UK imposes extra regulations for verifying an identity. You have to deliver at least three identity documents to verify your identity: your passport, a driving license, and proof from your bank or mobile operator. There is limited trust in passports as passports used to be delivered by post. It is not 100% guaranteed that the rightful reciever received the document and therefore extra checks are needed.

The identification process was already fully available online but in the UK it follows an old method: Knowledge-Based Verification. Digidentity identifies who you are by buying your data and asking personal questions about this data. It has a complicated scoring mechanism. The process is not user-friendly but 50% of the identity verifications are still going via this route. By strengthening this old method of identity verification with the new digital onboarding via the NFC chip, Digidentity was able to process many more identity requests.

"During COVID, we were able to scale up to 120.000 digital onboardings a day thanks to ReadID"

How ReadID helps

Within a short period, the NFC identity verification process was set up and Digidentity was able to scale up from 8000 to 120.000 onboardings a day. ReadID technology was key in scaling on such short notice.

Foreigners, from 150 different countries, living in the UK performed an identity verification. Under the UK Verify program, Polish passports and the Baltic states were a large part of it. Sometimes that was a challenge in the manual check. The photograph, for example, in Polish passports is differently encrypted. Working with ReadID solved this problem. With a clear photograph, they could perform a good check obtained from the chip.

The volume of the onboardings increased during the COVID-19 pandemic substantially. Before they were using ReadID technology, there was 60% manual entry by typing in the data of the identity documents. 30% Of the individuals applied with a mobile app and a picture selfie method. With the NFC technology, the completed identity verifications grew to 50% on mobile. Users can verify their identity faster and in a more user-friendly way with the ReadID NFC app integration.

Digidentity scaled up its own platform and also the other services needed to keep up with the increased volume, such as the manual selfie check. Normally six people work on the selfie check and with the COVID peak, there were a hundred employees working on this service alone.

Digidentity is now able to read the chip with NFC technology from ReadID and can rely on one document. By scanning the passport and performing an extra check to match the name and address, they know if the individual is living in the UK and is the rightful owner of the document. A simplified and scalable identity verification process without any data mistakes: a valuable asset for any Trust Service Provider.