Mitek’s Vetting.com Partnership Shows Growing Role of Biometric Background Check in UK

London-based background screening specialist Vetting.com has partnered with Mitek to facilitate background checks under the United Kingdom’s new framework for conducting such checks remotely.

In particular, Vetting.com will rely on the selfie-based remote identity verification technology developed by HooYu before the firm was acquired by Mitek last year, in a deal that was valued at GBP 98 million. In June, HooYu had been certified by the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as a Digital Identity Service Provider under the Digital Identity Certification Scheme (DICS) framework, meaning that it was officially recognized as an organization that could be relied upon to conduct digital identity verification.

The latter is, of course, a critical component of any background check process. And Vetting.com’s selection of the company is testament to the increasingly important role of biometrics in such processes in the UK now that it has its new framework in place.

HooYu’s identity verification solution essentially revolves around the use of facial recognition. An end user is prompted to upload a selfie image along with images of their official, physical ID, and facial recognition is used to match the two, confirming the person’s identity.

It’s an increasingly popular approach to remote identity verification that is practiced by a number of other identity tech vendors, including Yoti, which also just announced a background check partnership of its own – in that case with Konfir, a certified Attribute Service Provider under the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF). That both companies announcements have arrived so early in 2023 – soon after the UK’s reformed Right to Work legislation came into effect in October – suggests that biometric identity verification could play a ballooning role in the UK’s remote work economy in the coming months.

For Mitek’s part, the Vetting.com partnership is “great news”, commented the company’s Senior Director of Marketing, David Pope.

“At Mitek, we place a lot of focus on smart UI and UX features such as dynamic customer prompts, device language detection and logic steps – all of which we know help to reduce friction and speed processes up,” he said. “Using Mitek allows Vetting.com to extend the benefits of digital identity checking in a way that is easy to navigate and engineered to maximise user success.”

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January 9, 2022 – by Alex Perala