The work of Trust Stamp to deliver a secure authentication solution in low-resource environments for Mastercard’s Inclusive Identity initiative has gained even greater significance as Mastercard partners with African FinTech and Trust Stamp’s fellow Start Path participant, Paycode, to unlock services for the underserved and unbanked in Africa. As a result of this recent announcement, Trust Stamp’s unique AI-powered data transformation and comparison technology is positioned to protect the personal data of millions of individuals who are being empowered to achieve financial inclusion through Mastercard’s Community Pass™ platform.
Trust Stamp’s technology is used to turn sensitive biometric data into unique Irreversibly Transformed Identity Tokens (IT2) that are probabilistically compared to enable effective authentication, without the need to store or share biometric images or templates anywhere in the ecosystem. This innovative approach to biometric tokenization strengthens authentication assurance to support an accessible and intuitive user experience, without compromising security, consumer privacy, consumer control, or trust. The IT2 is revocable with granular control at the consumer or issuer level, providing superior protection versus vulnerable and exploitable biometric data and templates.
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Trust Stamp’s privacy-first approach is fundamental to large scale biometric implementations because the tokenized data poses no value outside of the enrolled network, virtually eliminating the potential for sensitive user information to be breached or weaponized. This enables partners like Mastercard and their co-innovators to leverage biometric technologies even where robust identity frameworks do not exist, while supporting compliance with the highest global standards for data protection.
Interoperability is critical to the adoption of a platform with the potential for massive impact driven by its wide scope of functionality and large scale of users. While Trust Stamp’s spoof-resistant facial biometric capture technology is integrated within the Mastercard Inclusive Identity system, the IT2 architecture also supports contactless multi-modal (palm and face) biometric tokenization together with other data from any source to seamlessly leverage secure, revocable tokens for identity assertion across a wide breadth of service delivery systems, posing immensely tangible benefits to societal and financial inclusion, data protection and convenience. Trust Stamp’s IT2 technology powers data portability and interoperability with intrinsic security and privacy.
Trust Stamp Chief Science Officer Dr. Norman Poh comments: “Revocable biometric tokens often came across as computationally expensive, requiring network connectivity to operate, or may have poor user experience. The Mastercard/Paycode use case demonstrates that the large-scale database deduplication required to support user enrollment in the field is both feasible and efficient using IT2 tokens, which are both compact and secure.
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The technology is designed to work in the low or no connectivity environments that are often characteristic of last-mile service delivery, with no need for sophisticated infrastructure or dedicated biometric capture devices. Any standard camera-enabled mobile phone or tablet turns into an acceptance device. Additionally, multi-modal IT2 fusion increases system accuracy and enables the solution to cover populations who may be restricted as to the biometric modalities they can provide, thus ensuring technology inclusion.”
Trust Stamp Chief Innovation Officer Raman Narayanswamy comments: “We draw parallels to the construct of revocation and re-issuance in digital payments and banking, where simple financial instruments like credit or debit cards can be cancelled and replaced without serious consequences to the consumer. To apply the very same capabilities to digital identity and associated assets requires exclusive use of tokenized identifiers in place of underlying biometric and other personal data. Only then can we command consumer trust in identity authentication by providing the ability to revoke, replace, and recover accounts without compromising the integrity of sensitive user data.”
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