VerifyMe- Trusted Identity In Urban Sprawl

Identify and green channel access to trusted individuals.

Design Challenge

Background screening has been a tedious process of running identity checks, verifying education and employment records, conducting reference checks, and more. It is both, time consuming and expensive. As gated communities increase in urban sprawl, delivery services from food to grocery to Amazon send unknown individuals, the issue of identity, and authentication arose.

Meanwhile, India instituted AADHAR, India’s Unique Identity Project, that gives a 12-digit unique identity number to all residents by collecting their fingerprints and iris scans. The AADHAR stack allowed the authorised call to verify the individual.

Can we build something that green channels trusted individuals to make access seamless for visitors and uninterrupting for the host.

Type of Client: StartUp

Industry : Informational technology & services

Insight:

The idea of browser sessions cookies in real world.

To anybody in the internet world, the idea of logged in session, where once you sign in , the browser holds your identity as a session is well known. Our strategy was to carry the session cookie in real world.

To build VerifyMe as a identity session where once checked in, all the physical spaces with VerifyMe allow you easy access. A physical version of Single-Sign-On.

Establishing the identity with AADHAR — biometric and OTP, further will further strengthen the trust.

Strategy:

To become a single source of truth for identity & access

Our strategy was to install VerifyMe app at high traffic commercial buildings where identity and security check was an establish norm. VerifyMe app provided a more robust AADHAR biometric based identity creation the first point of entry.

Once an identity was created, the photo taken at the point was used for future facial recognition based access. This made access uncluttered.Offices got a special app & dashboard to manage invite visitors who could pre-checking with their AADHAR and selfie to ensure green channel access.

Once critical mass of identities was crossed, the existing tedious and daily verification systems would be replaced with facial recognition based green channels connected to boom gates that only opened for authorised and trusted people.

What we did:

• User Research
• Product Strategy
• UX/UI design
• Development
• Scaling & Maintenance

Project Details

• NodeJS
• React + Redux
• Native React
• Android
• MongoDB
• AWS Api Gateway/Lambda
• Google Integrations
• AADHAR & Bio-metric device integration
• Facial recognition

Approach

The project started slow with multiple iterations in thinking while on drawing board. Our team abstracted the original access control idea into a scalable trusted identity platform based on the research insight.

A further clarity emerged when we separated the idea of identity platform from the various internal and external applications we built to use the identity for given specific business use case.

Addition of Graph database, AADHAR, bio-metric authentication and facial recognition ensured a complete system that could map identities and offer insights. The engineering team lived upto the iterative development with a micro service based architecture that separated all the layers of the identity stack.

Outcome

VerifyMe platform, emerged as a full aadhar backed identity management platform that supported internally built suite a initial products for attendance, access management, parking management , office visitor management , verification apps.

The platform’s design also supported API access to third party providers to build identity based applications for their use case.

Facial recognition based green channeling lead to significant decluttering. Black listing identities ensured NOT ALLOWED identities got no access.