Delivery Hero Saves €8 Million per Year After Reducing Fraud by 99% Using Amazon Rekognition

Based in Berlin, Germany, Delivery Hero operates on four continents worldwide, working with a network of brands to deliver goods such as groceries, flowers, and medicine to over 70 countries. It started as a food delivery business with a bicycle fleet of riders, and the term stayed as it expanded.

Initially, local fleet managers had to manually verify submitted rider photos, and if a photo didn’t match, they would then manually issue a warning or suspension. This impacted the effectiveness and accuracy of the solution. Of the photos submitted to Delivery Hero, 80 percent were faceless, and 4 percent showed faces that didn’t match the rider’s identity. It lacked a quick process to take account actions, such as suspension, based on poor photo submissions. To meet the deadline shared by the UAE government, Delivery Hero had 6 weeks to implement an automated solution to reduce fraud and meet compliance needs for facial verification.

To power its business, Delivery Hero had been using AWS services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, to store the photos collected for identity verification of its riders. Therefore, Delivery Hero chose AWS for the new solution because it already trusted AWS to store its riders’ personal data. Because Delivery Hero needed to accurately and efficiently reduce fraud on the more than 50,000 images that were submitted daily, it wanted to automate its facial verification solution.

Delivery Hero’s own facial-verification solution was developed by a team of four engineers, consisting of front-end and backend engineers. The team successfully implemented Amazon Rekognition in 4 weeks. With 2 weeks to spare before the 6-week deadline, Delivery Hero focused on seamless internal integration and rigorous testing to improve user experience. And the efforts paid off—Delivery Hero met the swiftly approaching deadline. “We had biweekly calls talking to the AWS team that were extremely helpful,” says Roberto Ferraz, software engineering manager at Delivery Hero. “AWS reviewed our proposal and recommended improvements on it, which definitely helped us deliver on time.”

With Delivery Hero’s solution, riders can start their shifts quickly and easily by submitting a selfie through the mobile app. Using Amazon Rekognition, Delivery Hero automatically compares the photo with the rider’s stored data in up to 0.7 seconds—a significant improvement over the previous manual verification process, which could take a few days. With seven million photos processed each month, these time savings add up quickly. Thanks to the solution’s intelligent design, riders are prevented from starting their shift if they submit a photo without a face—reducing faceless photo submissions from 80 percent to 0.1 percent. “We are making sure that we are compliant with laws and regulations everywhere, which impacts the safety of our riders and our customers,” says Ferraz. “Customers can be sure that the person coming to their door is someone that we hired and that we trust.”

If a photo does not match a rider’s stored data, the facial-verification solution seamlessly notifies the compliance service, which then automates remedial actions based on country-specific regulations. Delivery Hero’s compliance service automatically applies consequences for breaking the rules based on configurations created by local teams. With this streamlined process, the rider can receive a notification of suspension or termination, prioritizing the safety and security of riders and customers. “Amazon Rekognition is especially nice because it’s plug and play,” says Ferraz. “All the time that we dedicated to this project was spent 100 percent on development. There was no need to manage infrastructure or configurations.”

Using the facial-verification solution, Delivery Hero is reducing the impact of fraudulent behaviors and saving money, an estimated €8 million per year. By meeting the 6-week deadline, it avoided fines of €13,000 per rider caught by the UAE with documents not matching their account profiles, which could have resulted in €430,000 per month. And because Delivery Hero can prevent account-sharing fraud, it is saving €250,000 per month in two countries.