Silicon Valley's HyperVerge, one of the world’s largest identity verification firms, has expanded operations in the Philippines, seeing the country as the new growth center in Southeast Asia.

"Currently, we are working with three large financial institutions in the Philippines and we are keen on expanding our footprint moving forward,” announced HyperVerge Co-Founder Praveen Kumar.

Already, local demand for financial technology (fintech) apps soared by 68 percent in the past year.

The pandemic only accelerated the adoption of digital solutions for everyday tasks, from work to schools.

“The Philippines is becoming the new growth center in Southeast Asia and we want to be part of that story while also helping accelerate it much faster," said HyperVerge CEO Kedar Kulkarni.

"We see a huge opportunity to use our technology in a meaningful way, especially in supporting the government’s initiatives for financial inclusion,” he added.

HyperVerge empowers enterprises with artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to automate their processes, reducing financial frauds, opening up new revenue opportunities, and boosting profitability.

So far, it has helped lenders in different territories in India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States to save $50 million from fraud annually.

In the Philippines, over 70 percent of the over 100 million population emains unbanked and more rely on fintech services for their daily needs.

With local lockdowns enforced and contactless transactions preferred, the smartphone has become the new essential to be able to live life in the "new normal."

But the soaring usage of fintech apps in the country also translated to rising cybercrime and fraud rates.

The Department of Justice cited phishing, online scams and misinformation to be the most prevalent crimes in the country last year.

"Our technology simplifies the complex structure of AI and processes millions of images, videos and documents, to verify and ensure legitimacy,” Kumar explained.

“We are best positioned to support various industries, especially the finance and telecom sectors," he pointed out.

HyperVerge enables financial institutions to reduce risks related to fraud and identity theft while maintaining the efficient processing of documents and services.

"We want to help Filipinos gain more access to financial services, and our technology creates an information ecosystem that makes it easier for lenders to verify the information and detect fraudsters from the get-go." Kumar added.

HyperVerge offers state-of-the-art services such as Facematch & Liveness, ID quality checks and optical character recognition, Face-Based Deduplication to identify fraudsters, ID Forgery Checks, Video KYC and checks against a decentralized nationwide database.

It is also one of only 3 companies in the world that has ISO certification (ISO-30107-3) for single image liveness detection solutions, which ensures a faster and more accurate identity verification process.

Todate, it has100 customers around the world and has verified more than 450 million identities globally.

Its clients include CIMB, Home Credit, SquidPay, State Bank Of India and Grab.

HyperVerge is also backed by investors such as New Enterprise Associates, Milliways Ventures, and Dallas Venture Capital.