Face Check is now generally available

Earlier this year we announced the public preview of Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID – a privacy-respecting facial matching feature for high-assurance identity verifications and the first premium capability of Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Today I’m excited to announce that Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID is generally available. It is offered both by itself and as part of the Microsoft Entra Suite, a complete identity solution that delivers Zero Trust access by combining network access, identity protection, governance, and identity verification capabilities.

Unlocking high-assurance verifications at scale

There’s a growing risk of impersonation and account takeover. Bad actors use insecure credentials in 66% of attack paths. For example, impersonators may use a compromised password to fraudulently log in to a system. With advancements in generative AI, complex impersonation tactics such as deepfakes are growing as well. Many organizations regularly onboard new employees remotely and offer a remote help desk. Without strong identity verification, how can organizations know who is on the other side of these digital interactions? Impersonators can easily bypass common verification methods such as counting bicycles on a CAPTCHA or asking which street you grew up on. As fraud skyrockets for businesses and consumers, and impersonation tactics have become increasingly complex, identity verification has never been more important.

Microsoft Entra Verified ID is based on open standards, enabling organizations to verify the widest variety of credentials using a simple API. Verified ID integrates with some of the leading verification partners to verify identity attributes for individuals (for example, a driver’s license and a liveness match) across 192 countries. Today, hundreds of organizations rely on Verified ID to remotely onboard new users and reduce fraud when providing self-service recovery. For example, using Verified ID, Skype has reduced fraudulent cases of registering Skype Phone Numbers in Japan by 90%.

Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID

Powered by Azure AI services, Face Check adds a critical layer of trust by matching a user’s real-time selfie and the photo on their Verified ID, which is usually from a trusted source such as a passport or driver’s license. By sharing only match results and not any sensitive identity data, Face Check strengthens an organization’s identity verification while protecting user privacy. It can detect and reject various spoofing techniques, including deepfakes, to fully protect your users’ identities.

BEMO, a security solution provider for SMBs, integrated Face Check into its help desk to increase verification accuracy, reduce verification time, and lower costs. The company used Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID to protect its most sensitive accounts which belong to C-level executives and IT administrators.

Face Check not only helps BEMO improve customer security and strengthen user data privacy, but it also created a 90% efficiency improvement in addressing customer issues. BEMO’s help desk now completes a manual identity verification in 30 minutes, down from 5.5 hours before implementing Face Check.

“Security is always great when you apply it in layers, and this verification is an additional layer that we’ll be able to provide to our customers. It’s one more way we can help them feel secure.” – Jose Castelan, Support and Managed Services Team Lead, BEMO

Check out the video below to learn more about how your organization can use Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID:

Jumpstart with partners

Our partners specialize in implementing Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID in specific use cases or verifying certain identity attributes such as employment status, education, or government-issued IDs (with partners like LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, Au10tix, and IDEMIA). These partners extend Verified ID’s capabilities to provide a variety of verification solutions that will work for your business’s specific needs.

Explore our partner gallery to learn more about our partners and how they can help you get started with Verified ID.

Start using Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID

Face Check is a premium feature of Verified ID. After you set up your Verified ID tenant, there are two purchase options to enable Face Check and start verifying:

1. Begin the Entra Suite free trial, which includes 8 Face Check verifications per user per month.
2. Enable Face Check within Verified ID and pay $0.25 per verification.

Visit the Microsoft Entra pricing page for more details.

What’s Next?

Learn more about how Microsoft Entra Verified ID works and how organizations are using it today, and join us for the Microsoft Entra Suite Tech Accelerator on August 14 to learn about the latest identity management and end-to-end security innovations.

Ankur Patel, Head of Product for Microsoft Entra Verified ID

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Published on: August 12, 2024