Yoti will be providing biometric onboarding services for Co-op’s community support program. The cooperative organization is one of the UK’s biggest food retailers with more than 2,500 locations across the country, and also offers insurance, legal advice, and other services to its customers.

The partnership with Yoti specifically concerns Co-op’s community co-operate platform, which consolidates many of those services and introduces a social element. Members can use the platform to give and request advice about various subjects, or find how-to guides and learn more about activities in their area.

Yoti will help secure the platform with its Yoti Doc Scan technology. Anyone who wants to register as a support provider will first need to upload either a driver’s license or a passport, and then take a selfie. Doc Scan’s document recognition technology will ensure that the ID document is legitimate, while facial recognition tech will compare the selfie to that document to make sure they both depict the same person.

The solution will allow Co-op to onboard new users in mere minutes, without forcing customers to send sensitive documents to third parties. The identity verification process is encrypted, and will be supplemented with manual checks for additional assurance.

Yoti indicated that support initiatives like the co-operative platform are particularly important in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With that in mind, the partnership is in keeping with Yoti’s COVID-19 pledge to provide free digital identity technology to organizations that are leading the fight against the disease. The company is already providing digital IDs for NHS employees, and introduced a solution that allows health organizations to issue and update people’s COVID-19 test credentials without compromising the privacy of those individuals.

Synectics and Gamesys have also enabled biometric onboarding with Yoti Doc Scan in the past few months. Gamesys is using it to secure its online gaming operations, while Synectics is leveraging it for clients in the financial services industry.