AuthBridge Boosts Identity Verification Accuracy and Speed on AWS

AuthBridge utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to perform real-time identity verification for various purposes including employers verifying job candidates, online gaming companies validating new members, and banks verifying loan applicants. The verification process has evolved significantly since the company was founded. “Fifteen years ago, it was very different. We had a lot of human dependency for entering and verifying physical records,” says Ajay Trehan, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) at AuthBridge.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in demand for AuthBridge's AI-powered identity verification services in 2020. Many IT companies in India wanted to quickly onboard new hires to support the accelerated digitization of its clients. There was also a significant increase in requests from banking and financial services companies that needed to verify the identities of loan applicants, who were unable to physically leave their homes.

AuthBridge decided to migrate its IT infrastructure from its on-premises data center to the cloud in 2020. “Our on-premises servers were processing more than 2–3 million transactions a day, and managing the entire infrastructure had become complex,” says Shyam Sunder Prawal, vice president of Engineering at AuthBridge. This prompted AuthBridge to evaluate cloud options. Shyam Prawal recalls, “We wanted to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data seamlessly from our data center to the cloud without any issues.”

Following a thorough review process, AuthBridge decided to migrate to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “I felt AWS was ahead of other clouds in its range of services, and I think that’s still true today,” says Singh. To address migration concerns, AuthBridge utilized AWS Snowball. This service offers customers rugged storage devices to transfer large amounts of data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with AWS personnel being responsible for the data uploading process. 

AuthBridge adopted a lift-and-shift strategy, migrating applications from on-premises servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and moving its MySQL databases into Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL. “With Amazon RDS, we could easily scale our operations as transactions grew, while ensuring the highest level of security. Additionally, the managed services provided by Amazon RDS allowed us to offload much of the administrative complexity,” says Shyam Prawal. 

The migration to AWS has sparked the development of innovative methods for validating information provided by job candidates. Initially, AuthBridge verified paper-based forms along with photocopies of documents that established an individual’s identity, address, education, employment history, and other factors. The company then started examining digitized versions of these documents attached to emails. With AWS, AuthBridge took verification to the next level by developing iBRIDGE, its own custom background verification platform where candidates can submit all their application details. “By leveraging iBRIDGE on AWS, we can offer our clients the reliability, performance, and AI-enabled capabilities to expedite their hiring processes and build a next-generation workforce to drive the Indian economy,” says Singh.

iBRIDGE, along with other AuthBridge products, now leverages AI and machine learning to automate processes and accelerate operations. AuthBridge deployed Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Textract to significantly reduce the manual work involved in examining images and extracting specific data. “We use Amazon Rekognition to compare a person’s selfie with a photo in a digitized ID document,” says Singh. Furthermore, AuthBridge uses Amazon Textract to extract details such as date of birth and father's name. By integrating both AWS services, AuthBridge was able to increase processing accuracy across multiple use cases to nearly 100 percent.

Currently, AuthBridge is developing a data lake based on Amazon S3, with Amazon Redshift as the data warehouse and Amazon QuickSight for the business intelligence layer. “We are creating reports and dashboards to provide customers with insights across their data. This information can include the number of hires per department and any areas where candidates fall short in their background checks. Customers can use this data to improve their hiring practices,” explains Shyam Prawal.