Seamfix Reduced Fraud by 90% Using Amazon Rekognition

Seamfix, headquartered in Africa with offices in London and Dubai, provides digital identity verification services. Its cutting-edge solutions benefit multiple industries, including banking, government, and telecommunications, by guaranteeing secure digital identities. Holding ISO certifications—ISO 27701:2019 Privacy Information Management System (PIMS) and ISO 27001:2022 Information Security Management System (ISMS)—Seamfix streamlines new customer onboarding, transaction verification, account updates, know-your-customer procedures, and initial identity services, serving as a vital link connecting the global community with Africa.

Seamfix began building identity verification solutions in 2008 and has processed over 300 million identities to date. Its first use case, based on a fingerprinting algorithm, prevented students from taking college entrance exams under another person’s identity. However, that solution wasn’t always accurate, and it required a specialized device. As Seamfix expanded, it wanted to create a solution that would be more accurate and more convenient for its clients. In 2018, Seamfix began exploring a facial recognition solution based on artificial intelligence.

Seamfix chose AWS because of its scalability and reliability, which Seamfix could use to better realize its vision of making identity verification services more accessible. “For us, getting something that is most accurate is most important. That’s where AWS came in,” says Emewulu.

In 2019, Seamfix built verified.africa to help organizations in Africa combat the growing problem of identity fraud. Verified.africa is an ID verification suite that uses sophisticated artificial intelligence models for facial recognition to cross-check millions of identity data records quickly. To expand verified.africa to other countries and accommodate a growing customer base, Seamfix built verified.africa using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

Seamfix has also incorporated Amazon Rekognition—a service that offers pretrained and customizable computer vision capabilities to extract information and insights from images and videos—to deploy its near-real-time identity verification solutions through smartphone apps. Before using Amazon Rekognition, Seamfix accurately identified faces 80 percent of the time. Now, it can identify faces with 95–99 percent accuracy. This reduced instances of fraud for Seamfix’s clients by over 90 percent. In fact, since implementing this solution, cases of fraud involving SIM swaps have been significantly reduced. In addition, false negatives—where account owners have been incorrectly locked out of their accounts—have been virtually eliminated. “With our current technology, it’s very simple,” says Emewulu. “The matching is almost always correct based on the thresholds that we set.”

Using Amazon Rekognition, Seamfix also gained the speed it needed to better serve its customers. For example, one customer needed to clean up its database of more than 100 million faces by removing duplicates. Using its previous service, a project like this would have taken 5 years or more. Seamfix performed a proof of concept using Amazon Rekognition and went through 3.6 million faces in less than 2 hours. Seamfix could complete the job in less than 4 days.

Adding Amazon Rekognition has benefited Seamfix’s customers as well. Reducing fraud not only improves brand reputation, but it also nearly eliminates the consequences of fraud while helping customers stay compliant to regulations. Customers also save time by using Seamfix. They can get up and running within a week on Seamfix’s solution, as opposed to several months of independent setup if a customer built its own verification system.

Seamfix is taking its identity services worldwide, focusing on growth in Europe and the Middle East. As an independent software vendor on AWS Marketplace, Seamfix offers vital identity solutions such as face matching, background cleanup, image quality checking, and passive liveness detection for seamless adoption. Seamfix also uses the Open Subsurface Data Universe to cater to the unique needs of the African oil and gas industry.

In addition, Seamfix joined the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP)—a comprehensive, proven cloud migration program—in 2023. Migrating its customers to the cloud will make it easier and more cost effective to scale up and down, and it will reduce the need to run standby generators to keep services running during periods of power instability.

“Using AWS, we found the clarity we needed,” says Emewulu. “We want to use AWS to expand our services to fulfill our mission of making a secure digital identity a fundamental right.”

Seamfix’s collaborations with GSMA, Tech UK, and COMIT demonstrate its global presence, with a shared mission to provide access to secure digital identities—making life, work, and learning more reliable for both Africa and the global community.