In today’s fast-paced world of tourism and travel the user experience as well as security cannot be negotiated. As millions of travelers move across borders daily, travel platforms are responsible for verifying each traveler’s identity–accurately, swiftly, and in compliance with global regulations.
One of the world’s leading travel platforms partnered with Surepass to solve a growing challenge: verifying the identities of international travelers across multiple countries without slowing down the onboarding or booking experience. The result? A robust, automated KYC infrastructure that reduced onboarding time, improved fraud detection, and enhanced global compliance—without compromising user experience.
The Challenge
The client, which is a global travel platform that has millions of customers across 70+ nations, faced the major challenges in the verification of travelers. As the platform expanded into newer geographies and markets, it had to process identities from a wide variety of countries, languages, and document formats.
What they struggled in:
- Uncoherent KYC Processes Across Borders
Different regions have distinct KYC rules, which makes it hard to ensure a consistent procedure. National IDs, passports as well as language variants made it more complicated to identify verification. - High Drop-Off Rates During Traveler Verification
Longer wait times during onboarding or bookings due to manual document review often led to user drop-offs–especially from mobile-first travelers looking for quick, seamless transactions. - Insufficient Real-Time Identity Verifications
In the past, manual KYC procedures resulted in identity fraud, spoofing and fraudulent passport uploads would often be discovered at the time of transactions. This led to increased costs for operations as well as customer support escalates. - Legal Compliance the pressure
As an international platform that was a global platform, it had to be bound by strict international standards of compliance, such as GDPR regulations, FATF guidance, as well as local travel and data security regulations. In the absence of live, conforming KYC checks had become an issue.
The client required an adaptable but powerful KYC solution that would be able to adapt to different countries, automate the verification of travelers, identify fraud immediately, and easy to scale.
Automate your KYC Process & reduce Fraud!
We have helped 200+ companies in reducing Fraud by 95%
The Solution
Surepass was in close collaboration with a travel agency to implement a complete digital identity verification system specifically designed for international travelers. The goal was to provide an easy and safe KYC experience, from the moment that an individual signs up or buys tickets, and through after-transaction compliance checks.
Here’s how Surepass made it possible:
Passport OCR support for 150+ countries
Surepass has deployed its OCR engine, which is advanced and allows machines-readable zones (MRZ) in passports as well as national IDs from more than 150 nations. The engine extracts traveler data—name, DOB, nationality, document number—in seconds with high accuracy.
Face Match based on AI Likeness detection
The users were asked to take a picture at the time of verification. Surepass’s facial recognition software immediately compared the selfie with the photo on their passport to verify the authenticity.
Liveliness Recognition
In order to prevent spoofing and deepfakes, Surepass introduced liveliness checks in the selfie phase. The software detects movement in real-time, as well as 3D facial features as well and other biometric indicators to ensure that the user has physically been present during verification.
Multi-Country KYC Configuration
Surepass helps travel companies to create specific KYC processes for each region to ensure that the KYC flows comply with regional requirements (e.g., EID authentication in Europe, passport verification throughout the Middle East, Aadhaar PAN linking to Indian travellers, etc.) and a central display.
Real-Time APIs
Surepass’s KYC modules are delivered through secure, real-time APIs. This allows the user to incorporate authentication directly in their registration and booking processes, on both mobile and the web.
Impact
Results were immediately apparent and were amazing.
70% reduction in the verification Time
The process that took hours or even for certain regions was done in just 30 seconds. This improved the conversion rate during a busy time of booking.
Enabled multi-country KYC at scale
Surepass’s authentication and passport OCR modules processed travelers’ documents from more than 150 countries with no delay in performance or loss of quality at all, even in the peak of demand.
30% decrease in Support tickets for KYC related issues
Travelers were faced with less delays and errors and this resulted in the reduction of assistance desk tickets related to documents and ID submission.
100% Compliant across Global Markets
With the ability to customize KYC flows, clients have been able to fully comply with local and international laws that include auditable logs and confirmation trails.
Why It Matters
In a business, where time is of the essence, traveling onboarding and verification should not be a source of obstruction. The travel platforms must ensure that genuine travelers can move fast, while criminals can be stopped at the airport.
Surepass has helped the world’s travel giant achieve an uncomplicated user experience for customers.. Through the integration of real-time verification of documents as well as AI-based face match and biometric verification, Surepass enabled faster bookings with stronger security as well as greater compliance across the borders.
What’s Next
The platform for travel is currently in partnership with Surepass to improve the personalized nature of the journeys of verification for travelers in accordance with the risk profile, frequency of trips and previous behavior. The plans are to offer videos KYC for countries with high risk of being a target as well as blockchain-based traveler IDs to loyalty customers, powered by Surepass’s new-generation identity infrastructure.
Automate your KYC Process & reduce Fraud!
We have helped 200+ companies in reducing Fraud by 95%
