Onfido is teaming up with Civic to provide secure customer onboarding for the latter’s upcoming cryptocurrency wallet. The blockchain-based Civic Wallet will allow users to store and trade cryptocurrencies without sharing any superfluous personal information, providing account access through a private key that will be stored on the user’s mobile device.

Onfido will make it easier to open a new account, providing facial recognition tech that matches a photo of a government ID against a person’s facial features during registration. Together, the two companies are hoping to give people more control over their personal information, allowing them to carry out secure cryptocurrency transactions without the need to disclose that information to a third party.

“We chose to partner with Onfido because they share our vision of providing everyone with a digital identity they control,” said Civic Co-Founder and CEO Vinny Lingham. “Their AI verification technology delivered higher pass rates without compromising on fraud protection.”

“We are privileged to work together in pursuit of using blockchain for decentralized identity management,” added Onfido Co-Founder and CEO Husayn Kassai.

The Civic Wallet has redundant backup systems that will allow people to recover their accounts if their mobile device goes missing, while the introduction of reliable identity verification will eventually enable the purchase of age-restricted goods like alcohol. It’s also another bit of good news for Onfido, which has partnered with Checkr and raised $50 million in capital in the past few months alone.

The Civic Wallet is expected to launch sometime in the fall.

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(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)