- London’s OCR Labs announced a partnership with Bloom Money, a company that seeks to enhance financial wellness for immigrant communities.
- Bloom Money will leverage OCR Labs’ technology to provide biometric and document verification during its onboarding process.
- OCR Labs won Best of Show at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong in 2017.
London-based digital ID verification innovator – and Finovate Best of Show winner – OCR Labs has teamed up with Bloom Money, a platform that is geared toward helping diaspora communities in Europe better manage their finances. Bloom Money will use OCR Labs’ technology to conduct automated biometric verification, document verification, and reauthentication during the onboarding process for new customers.
Bloom Money bases its offering on what it calls “tried and tested” methods of money management – whether they are called contributions, ajo, hagbad, or pardna – used by communities around the world. The company decided to partner with OCR Labs to help it handle the challenge of working with diverse communities with a wide variety of identity documents to be accounted for. “OCR Labs Global is the only vendor who could accurately recognize people of different ethnicities and do liveness verification,” Bloom Money co-founder Nina Mohanty explained. Mohanty reflected on her own experience with the limitations of identity verification technology, saying that OCR Lab’s ability to verify more than 16,000 documents from more than 230 countries and territories is “critical” to the service Bloom Money offers.
“Bloom Money is building an app that is going to make the management of a rotating savings club far simpler and transparent for many communities,” OCR Labs General Manager International Russ Cohn said. “At OCR Labs Global, we are also making verification simple and transparent for the businesses we partner with. We believe that proving who your customers are shouldn’t be a barrier to scale.”
Founded in 2014 and launching its first solution in 2018, OCR Labs leverages optical character recognition technology, advanced facial matching technology using liveness detection and biometric digital verification to verify identity documents and provide highly accurate authentication. The company’s technology covers more than 16,000 identity documents in more than 140 languages, and provides a face matching accuracy of 99.997%. Making its Finovate debut at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2016, OCR Labs earned a Best of Show award a year later upon its return to the Finovate stage for FinovateAsia in Hong Kong.
OCR Labs began the year with news of an investment of $30 million in Series B funding. The funding was led by Equable Capital, a New York-based family office, and will be used to help OCR Labs expand its team in both North America and EMEA. The financing takes the company’s total funding to $46 million.