BuyaCar.co.uk, a British based online motor retail specialist, has introduced facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology to protect customers from online fraud. The company claims that facial recognition is the latest add-on to what is already an unrivalled suite of anti-fraud measures in the online retail sector.

Estimates of the growing cost of online fraud in Britain have reached £10 billion annually. However, rapid business growth poses the triple challenge of staying one step ahead of finance fraud techniques, scaling up the processing of finance applications as efficiently as possible and keeping the customer experience as seamless and simple as possible. The online firm claims that the trials of a state-of-the-art facial recognition and analysis tool, enabling finance customers to prove their identity during the application process, have delivered on all three challenges. Thus, enabling faster processing of applications with positive responses from the customers.

The BuyaCar.co.uk finance application page prompts customers to briefly link their device’s camera to its website and compares the user’s face, from multiple angles, with photographic documents submitted in support of their application.

Austin Collins, managing director of BuyaCar.co.uk, said: “Our business has quadrupled in the last three years, meaning that the processing of paper-based proof of identity was becoming a real bottleneck. By automating the process, using facial recognition analysis that problem has gone away, while also adding a valuable extra layer of protection from fraudulent applications.”