The swarm — unleashing hundreds of AI bots to keep your customers safe

September 4, 2019

Oh yeah, there’s power in numbers! Remember that scary scene in World War Z when a tsunami of zombies swarms over the walls of a fortress? Director Marc Forster said his inspiration for it came from watching armies of ants swarming over an ant hill in his backyard.

I’m going to go with ants rather than zombies as an analogy for how Mitek uses AI bots to digitally verify identities. This analogy works better because while all zombies have the same job of devouring human flesh, ants perform different jobs. Some tend to eggs, others feed larvae, forage for food or build and restore the nest. They go about these various tasks simultaneously, all in service to the common goal of enabling the colony to thrive.  

Mitek Mobile Verify® takes a similar approach, and the goal is to make your customers safe so your business can thrive. This sophisticated software verifies the identity of online and mobile applicants by unleashing hundreds of AI bots to swarm over snapshots of applicants’ real-world ID documents. Each bot—including computer vision, machine learning and deep learning algorithms—has a specific job, examining the ID image in a different way.

One bot, for instance, has the job of checking the portrait on the ID to make sure it’s a human face. Others examine font usage and consistency, compare data in barcodes to data printed on the ID, or look for suspicious shadows and other indicators the document might be a fake.

An additional level of machine learning then takes all the evidence gathered by this army of AI bots. It decides how much weight (relative importance) to give each point of evidence based on everything discovered about the ID and everything known about genuine and forged/counterfeited IDs in Mitek’s ever-expanding document repository. If you’d like to learn more about Mitek’s innovative approach to AI, download this whitepaper.

What I find hard to fathom is that all of this happens in a few seconds, faster than an army of ants occupying an open bag of Sour Patch Zombie Kids candies. Mobile Verify returns an immediate definitive answer to the question “Is this identity genuine and does it belong to the applicant?” Nothing scary about that, just a sweet result for your legitimate customers and your business.

Download our Future of identity white paper