Combating Fraud in the Travel Industry – Bala Kumar, Jumio

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong TV. Our next guest today on Tech strong is Mr.

Balakumar Bala is the chief product officer of jumio, and I hope I got that right Paula. Hey, welcome to text drunk TV. Allen great to be here again.

How you doing today? I'm doing great. And I hope you are as well.

So, you know what? Maybe I know you've been on Tech strong in the past, but Maybe people don't remember or didn't see you. Why don't we start with a little bit of your background?

And then if you wouldn't mind a little Jew me, oh background as well. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah, my name is balakumar and being a jumia for exactly two years in one week now, right? Thank you. So prior to coming to jumio.

I spent 18 years at TransUnion. I was responsible for the fraudid products at Transunion and I've been in the space for the load a decade at this point. It's been a very interesting Journey.

It's constantly evolving and it's evolving because the frost is keep us on our toes. The technology have an evolved seen the magical effects of chat GPT at this point. Oh God.

I alright ring the bell. It didn't take us that long to mention it. Yeah.

It is and you know, I I just had this conversation with someone what? Will get more into it in a second, but if you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about the company and give people a little background. Yeah, absolutely.

So, um, do you is all about government issued IDs and similar ideas. So driver's license a passport other top types of national IDs. We verify those ideas to make sure that they are genuine we make sure that they are valid and we also make sure that it is actually owned by the person whose name is on the ID.

So we want to make sure it's not stolen ID card that somebody else is presenting and so it's a combination of is this a valid comedy shoot ID? And is it possessed by the person who submitting that ID? And is it an ID that is in common use by that person?

So make sure it's not an expired ID Etc. So it's a combination of those things that powered by jumia. That's a core bread and butter.

We have done this for several years at this point in time. We have processed well over a billion transactions. Totally when it comes to IDs we have looked at process well over 600 million IDs at this point in time at a global level.

So if there is an idea out there we have seen it. We have crossed it and we've provided feedback to our customers on the ability of that ID. That's of course.

Over the course of the last couple years. We have expanded our core offering to make it available as part of a broader orchestration platform. Because when you think about it.

Customers our customers within Financial Services gaming Hospitality travel. They are not just looking at the ID they're looking at other aspects of that individual like the name address email phone number Etc. And so now our orchestration platform can provide verification and validation of those elements as well.

So we are essentially looking at the overarching information associated with an individual and we're able to come back to our customers and tell them whether this is good or whether it requires additional scrutiny before they process that particular transaction. So that's essentially what jumia does but it's all anchored on our course strength, which is audibly need to process government issue IDs. Got it.

That's interesting when you say government issued IDs. I assume we're talking about driver's license and passports for for civilians if you will, but then also sort of like special ideas for DOD type or other government kind of ideas, you know for for Access of Government computer systems or you know people who work. For the government and so forth.

Correct. If it's a national issue ID. It's something that we definitely verify and validate and in a very important aspect here is think about the last time you traveled you cannot get through airport security without Widing a government issued ID.

That is the that is how much these IDs are trusted. When you go through airport security, they don't ask you for your email ID or your phone number to verify you are who you claim you are that they don't care about that. They want to see a comedy shoot ID and then they compare the picture on the ID to your face to make sure that it is the same person before they allow the person through that is in a physical Channel we provide that same level of scrutiny in the digital or virtual channel.

So if you're online and you're submitting a transaction Then either through our mobile app or through web UI through your web browser. You basically hold up the ID we take a picture of that ID. We ask you to take a selfie so we can compare the image on the ID with the picture that we have taken and we're also checking to see it's not when you're taking a selfie.

It's the actual live person and not somebody holding a photo up to the screen. So we're doing liveness checks as well. So it's a combination of all of these things that gives our customers the confirmation that they are working with the genuine individual which is why I bring up the airport security analogy, right?

That's how much this ID is trusted. And so when you do this type of a check online, you can be assured that you're working with a genuine individual. So just I want to be clear to our audience.

On the online world. They're not working with TSA at the airport. That is correct.

That is correct. I think because I've seen it at the airports now where they're actually scanning the driver's license, like the the TSA officer isn't the guy looking he scans it then it comes up and I guess that some other information they're looking at. So let me you know, we've all not we I don't know we all have but I certainly have been.

you know following this whole real ID thing that keeps getting pushed back in terms of the you know, the the must have phase. I think it's now pushed back to 2025 or something like that. What is what what's holding it up?

First of all, right. Why because they've been talking about this now, it seems like for five years. I think they've definitely been impacted by the pandemic it requires end users to or civilians go out and get that new idea as well.

It getting an appointment at the DMV is at this point really really hard the wait times are long and so I don't think it would have been realistic for them to expect everyone to have real IDs in time at least based on the original deadline. So it's it's essentially gotten pushed out quite a bit. Mostly I'd say because of the pandemic and then this also the verification aspects of this that come in but to me that's less of the issue.

It's really about people out there on the streets being able to get actual real IDs. Try it. So, you know.

When we talk about what you're doing, you know people refer to this as digital Trust. Right. How do we You know, how can we trust that you are who you are first-hand knowledge of one of my nephews came to me.

I guess it was around Thanksgiving because that's the only time I see him is it holidays like that, you know and his coinbase account. Was was hacked. And in order to read well, they wound up emptying the account but to order reestablish the account he had to do exactly what he's saying take a picture of his ID and then him holding the ID with space.

And to kind of reestablish. He had issues because his ID was from California and he lives now in Florida and so it just didn't all match up and it became a bit of a nightmare for him. Is this something that jumio is automating or is there real humans looking at these pictures and so forth and that'll leave me of course to the chat GPT question because that obviously is something that AI can solve.

I would imagine pretty easily. Well, so we are a tech company we use mlai for all the processing that we run. So every using one of the transaction that comes through the door is automated.

Our automated models are automated systems basically run hundreds of different models on every single transaction to try and figure out if the picture that we have extracted. It's a good one. We extract information from the ID we doing a ton of checks on the security controls that's on the ID.

We are checking the picture the selfie to the picture and the document there's a ghost image on the document. So we check against that we're looking at you mentioned California driver's license. Well, it's not one California driver's license because depending on the year of issue and say multiple different templates that are still valid and active and so we are checking to see what is the year of his humans and based on the year of issue.

And what are the controls that should be on it? We should the name information be wasted the address information be so we're doing a ton of those checks as well and all of those are automated. And then we provide back a response back to the customer on whether that was we feel comfortable with it or if it requires additional scrutiny or if they should reject it.

They are instances where sometimes the image may be too blurred. They may be instances where our customers actually require in addition to all these checks for a human to also check it. So we also have the ability to run it to our back office way.

We have humans who can actually scrutinize this and provide feedback as well. So we provide both a fully automated end-to-end automated zero humans in the loop Solution. That's called jumia go.

And then we also offer a hybrid solution that includes a combination of fully automated and a response back and in some exceptional situations lean on the back office. So they human can actually review that and provide addition. Excuse me, additional confirmation as well.

So we offer both a hundred percent fully automated solution and a hybrid solution that has humans in the loop. Yeah. So this past week?

But this past week, you know with the rumors of an indictment in New York on a former president. Trump we saw all these AI generated images of him getting arrested if we could generate AI images of him getting arrested. We could probably generate an AI image of you.

holding a license how this this got to be a problem for you guys. I imagine it's a this is what I said earlier. The reason I'm excited about the space.

I'm in is because it's a constant race to stay ahead of the fraudsters. I always the analogy I paint my kids is this is like the Tom and Jerry show, you know, it's the Tom's constantly chasing Jerry and that's essentially what we see happening the fraud in the front space. So yeah with this there's so many tools out there that makes it really easy for fraudsters to generate those deep fake videos for them to be able to manipulate images Etc.

We see a ton of those types of digitally manipulated images coming through a big part of this what you were talking about. We call those presentation attacks. So this variety of presentation attacks that people try but we have the controls because we are constantly looking out for these types of patterns.

We have the technology that allows us to detect and be able to Signal this do we do it 100% of the times? No, if anyone tells Do there's a solution that is 100% fraud proof. They outlying it is impossible.

But are we effective majority of the times absolutely, right? And so towards it is more about stopping most of the fraud. They may be once these enthusiasts that slip through the cracks, but then we can always come back and say wait a second and this is where the humans in the helpers because we can do additional scrutiny and then provide that additional confirmation back to the customers when deepfakes is definitely a challenge.

It's not yet reached a peak of fraudsters are just starting to discover and starting to play around with it. So we would expect this to grow or these types of attacks to grow repeated of time. But guess what we are already aware of this so we are ahead of that.

We are already starting to put in controls to make sure that we can detect and start flagging these types of transactions, but it's definitely a problem. It's problem across the industry. Get it.

You know what by I tell you the time goes really quick here where way over time for people who want to get more information about you know what I mean? com. Obviously j u m i o but what's the best way to engage?

com their email IDs. We are on Facebook. We are on Twitter.

They're multiple ways to reach out to us. I think the most important thing I would say is as an industry. We have a responsibility to protect and consumers not just jumia all of us in the space who are fighting fraud.

We have a responsibility to protect and consumers every single day. You hear about data breaches. And it's a responsibility of organizations to make sure they're doing the best they can to protect their consumers.

But again, it's this fraudsters will always find a vulnerability throughout this will always figure out a way to get access to information and when they get access to that type of information it immediately makes its way to the dark web and now it's available for people to purchase these stolen credentials. And so when you have the stolen credentials, there's a leakage of name or address or email or a SSN. Now you have fraud says submitting that information and online forums.

They go try to create a checking account. They try to create a credit card account Etc. We have a responsibility to protect these victims.

These guys are already breached. They're already victims of identity theft. We have a responsibility to protect them by enforcing strong ID verification checks, we can make sure that these victims are not further hurt by the acts of fraudsters.

And therefore it is very important for companies to use Solutions like jumia where you can actually ask for a government should ID check the driver's license get a selfie because think about it, right if a froster has access to the name address email phone is this and information and they suffer the application and you don't even see in this faceless Channel everything is going to check out the names going to be good that dress is going to be good because these are these are information or credentials of a valid living human being right but the moment you ask them to take a selfie the moment you ask them to hold up a comment. You should ID to the camera now, you're basically asking the fraudsters to post for a mugshot, right? Right.

I see exactly it. That's it. So it's very critical for organizations to do the responsible thing to protect in consumers were already victims of identity theft so they can Safeguard those people and I'm not advocating for junior this multiple Solutions like jumia out there but use fraud controls use a good government.

You should already check to make sure that you're protecting these people that's the best we can do to protect and consumers. I love it. Hey, father.

I want to thank you for coming on and enlightening us today. It's supposed to come back again. I'd love to you know, we we're way over but I can talk about this stuff all day.

Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you Adam.

Thanks for having me on my pleasure balakumar Chief product officer jumio here on techstrong TV. We're gonna take a break and we'll be right back.