Facial Recognition Helps Financial Intermediaries Acquire Clients During the Pandemic

In Partners Group SK, face to face meetings can now be replaced with remote servicing of clients, with biometrics taking care of their verification.

Partners Group SK, one of the largest financial intermediaries in Slovakia, is now using facial recognition technology by Innovatrics, to verify the identity of their customers. “Properly checking the identity of a client is among the first requirements of the client-intermediary relationship. When we can’t meet with clients face to face, facial biometrics is the ideal solution that can be used wherever they are,” says Partners Group SK CEO Juraj Juras. The ability to reach out to clients remotely comes in extra handy during the prolonged lockdowns caused by the pandemic.

Implemented by our partner, Softec, the solution uses a web interface to read the identity documents and identify the face of a client. The technology in the Digital Onboarding Toolkit takes care of the rest: reading data from the document to save time on typing, comparing the selfie with the ID photo, and making sure that the client is alive. “This is all done in real time while upholding all GDPR requirements,” adds Juras.

Partners Group SK is the first intermediary to adopt facial recognition for onboarding new and verifying existing clients in Slovakia. Other similar companies have already been using parts of our solution, e.g., for quickly scanning data from IDs. When reaching out to financial intermediaries, a client has to sign a lot of forms to comply with the regulations. Automated reading of IDs removes the need to fill out necessary information by hand and cuts down the administration time significantly. The intermediary sector is especially strong in Slovakia, with over half of the mortgage business originating from intermediation.