OneSpan Notary enhancements secure digital identities

OneSpan announced expanded features for OneSpan Notary, a next-generation, all-in-one, cloud-connected solution that enables organizations to transform the way notaries and customers complete agreements and notarize documents in a secure and trusted environment.

These new capabilities will now support Remote Online Notarization (RON) identity-proofing requirements to securely identify signers unknown to the notary.

Document forgery is a significant problem for banks and financial services. A recent survey found that 54% of banks reported dealing with document forgery in 2022. OneSpan Notary provides a seamless, secure digital journey for the historically paper-intensive notarization process, while delivering bank-grade security and facilitating RON compliance requirements to mitigate fraud.

The newly expanded capabilities of OneSpan Notary include additional identity verification features, enabling organizations to securely identify unknown signers.

“There are only two types of people in the world: known and unknown. Verifying the identity of an unknown signer is not only a critical step of a notarization in high-value transactions, such as property transfers, mortgages, estate documents, and powers of attorney, but it’s also a legal requirement no matter if the signer is in-person or remote,” said Sameer Hajarnis, CPO at OneSpan.

“OneSpan Notary’s latest enhancements enable customers to turn unknown signers into known ones by providing identity verification capabilities through a seamless and secure digital experience,” added Hajarnis.

OneSpan Notary helps mitigate risk with strong identity-proofing options and built-in security controls, by positively identifying signers before they access the online notary session. Expanded identity-proofing capabilities include:

• Knowledge-based authentication (KBA): The signer is presented with “out-of-wallet” questions compiled from public and private data, such as marketing data, credit reports, or transaction history. These out-of-wallet questions are generated in real-time, making it difficult for anyone other than the signer to answer correctly.
• ID verification: The signer takes a photo of their government-issued ID directly from their mobile device. Machine learning algorithms analyze the authenticity of the photo ID in real-time, to determine whether the ID document is genuine, deterring deepfakes and fraudulent documents.
• Remote ID presentation: The notary confirms the identity of the signer in the session by comparing their government-issued ID provided during the ID verification process and the on-screen video of the signer in the session.

Launched earlier this year, OneSpan Notary is built on top of OneSpan’s Transaction Cloud Platform, assembling services from OneSpan’s full portfolio of enterprise-grade solutions, including e-signature, identity verification, authentication, high-assurance virtual collaboration, and secure vaulting.

OneSpan plans to integrate into Notary an additional capability from its portfolio to include secure document vaulting, leveraging blockchain technology from the ProvenDB acquisition. OneSpan Notary is currently available for known and unknown signer scenarios in approximately 16 states.