Sometimes serendipity can create beautiful business. When we were looking for a partner to scale our increasingly crucial and critical Remote Biometric Authentication (RBA) offering to clients, we had to look no further than a winner in our 2019 BCX Digital Innovation Awards.

A Thought Leadership piece by Liziwe Maseko: BCX Executive: Digital Software Engineering

iiDENTIFii, a tech start-up which has developed cutting-edge RBA technology that combats identity theft and fraud, won the SME category at the awards. We knew we had to work with them as partners in a rapidly transforming digital space that required a trusted and secure method of verifying and authenticating digital identities and protecting privacy.

Scaling an award winner

Partnerships between big companies and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are successful, mutually beneficial and financially rewarding when there is a meeting of minds, trust and vision as well as a pure business transaction.

This goes to more than just business for us at BCX. It is also about telling SMEs we are open for partnerships, that we want to do our bit to improve the South African economy. Where we can, let us be a big brother to you and we will go to the market together. In turn, big businesses can benefit from the power of small enterprises and what they bring to the party – a diversified supply chain, agility, innovation, cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

Our relationship with iiDENTIFii is multi-faceted. I’ll start with them being an SME. It’s important for SMEs to be sustainable and to grow for the South African market to develop. iiDENTIFii are an SME, a tech start-up, with a cool idea that solves several problems, but they still faced ‘typical’ SME challenges.

We partner with SMEs to solve those challenges. What can we do together? We have access to resources that perhaps an SME doesn’t and our partnership with iiDENTIFii was such that we could take a product to the market in such a way that it benefited both BCX and iiDENTIFii.

For larger businesses, working with SMEs is part of our responsibility as corporate citizens to help SMEs grow by enabling them greater access to market and resources, creating an environment that ensures that they thrive. Through that, they can scale their business, create employment, contribute to the GDP and, together, we can help create a more sustainable economy.

RBA: not just commerce, but social good

What iiDENTIFii’s world-leading RBA solution offers is a secure, quick authentication and onboarding process that protects the digital identity of their customers and their customers’ customers. Essentially, they ensure you can trust that the person you are interacting with is the actual person and not an impersonator seeking to commit identity fraud.

With the pandemic forcing people to migrate to living, banking and studying online, this was vital. Identity fraud is a traumatic and emotional experience. It can destroy lives. RBA is critical in verifying authenticity in a time when our digital identities are such an integral and necessary part of our lives.

The iiDENTIFii technology uses 3-D facial recognition to deliver a biometric liveness from the simplicity of a “selfie”. It cross-matches data points and uses databases to verify the user through secure triangulated authentication. A customer using a mobile device can be authenticated and onboarded in 30 seconds in a secure, ease-of-use, frictionless, automated process.

As Jonas Bogoshi, our BCX CEO, said of iiDENTIFii: “(they are) ground-breaking innovators in the sphere of blockchain technology, improving the field of artificial intelligence by developing one of the most accurate face matching and secure proof-of-life technologies, not only locally but across the globe”.

Time to scale

That our partnership with iiDENTIFii emanated from the BCX Digital Innovation Awards was as much serendipity as it was an outcome we had hoped the awards would create, and that is a channel for us and others to explore business opportunities and solutions for customers. With iiDENTIFii, we have taken the awards to the next level, which highlights the BCX thinking on partnerships. We saw a fit for what we do and wanted to work together.