A major social benefits program in South Africa is getting biometric security.

The South Africa Social Security Agency (SASSA) issues its grant cards through the South African Post Office, which awarded a contract this March to a local consortium to build a multi-modal biometric verification engine. The consortium, led by Magix Africa and including Dataproof and biometrics specialist Fides Cloud Technologies, has now developed a system that will allow SAPO to biometrically verify SASSA card recipients, helping to reduce fraud.

The system is now operational after a brief trial phase, and is based primarily on fingerprint recognition, with authorities aiming to align the biometrics of SASSA recipients to those that will be featured on new fingerprint scanning payment cards from Europay, Mastercard, and Visa. But going forward, the companies said that SAPO is exploring the idea of incorporating palm recognition into the system, as well.

For now, the fingerprint scanning system will help to weed out fraud together with an automated monitoring system that will track biometric authentications across SAPO and SASSA branches, alerting authorities if someone attempts to register duplicate biometrics in an attempt to fraudulently procure additional benefits.

Source: BusinessReport