Jumio On Montreal As AI Tech Hub

There are many locales that come to mind in looking toward the next big thing in FinTech, in payments, in AI and beyond. London and Silicon Valley make the cut, and increasingly, so does Montreal.

The Canadian city is increasingly on FinTech’s radar amid a strong academic backdrop and relatively relaxed immigration policies. Those attributes help set the stage for tech upstarts to hire the talent they need and want.

So it is that Jumio, the digital identity verification firm, has been setting up shop in Montreal, announcing last month that it is launching an AI lab, focusing on machine learning and deep learning technologies. The firm has more than 100 million authenticated IDs under its belt, so why focus sights more keenly on AI?

In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Jumio CTO Labhesh Patel said the lab will complement existing efforts from the company out of Vienna. Activities will be focused on identity verification, data extraction, fraud detection and risk scoring.

Patel told Webster, “we have the entire workflow for ID verification mapped out.” For Jumio, the Montreal lab will examine every part of the ID verification workflow to determine where AI and machine learning would provide additional benefits.

The need is there, he said, as the bad guys get ever more adroit in plying their trade, with an eye on building IDs by cobbling together information that is all too readily available on the Dark Web.

The problem is one where merchants and FIs need to know that the person on the other side of a transaction is who they say they are.

“We want to make sure that there are two layers where all the good actors get convergence in the ID verification workflow and all the bad actors get shut down,” he said to Webster.

Jumio has enough data in hand, he noted, across the hundreds of millions of IDs already verified where machines can cull those bad actors through initial scans.

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