Matt Prendergast Profile Picture

Matt Prendergast

Matt is the Product Marketing Director at Yoti and has helped raise the brand, message and ethics of Yoti. Matt strongly believes in the mission of Yoti where AI can be deployed responsibly to protect people and children from online harms and prevent fraud and scams.

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How Yoti can help combat digital injection attacks

As use of online verification grows, there inevitably follows increasing temptation for bad actors to develop ways to exploit the process. As a provider of verification services we must show businesses, regulators and governments that we have robust anti-spoofing technology, checks and processes. An emerging but rapidly growing threat for verification services are digital injection attacks.   What are injection attacks? Injection attacks are a form of attack on remote verification services. Direct attacks are the most common attempt to spoof systems. Examples of direct attacks are: Paper image 2D and 3D masks  Screen image Video imagery Direct attacks are

3 min read
Man working at laptop in office setting

NIST approval explained

Many companies in the identity space talk of NIST certification. What does this mean for you as a user of identity services and what does it mean for your customers?   Who is NIST? NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. NIST’s remit is to create and certify measures, standards and technology to enhance trade and productivity. Formed in 1901, their remit is to provide standards and certification for businesses. At first this included clocks and thermometers, all kinds of ‘weights and measures’.  But over time

3 min read
People with their estimated ages

On Facial Age Estimation, improvements and updates

We continue to invest in improving the accuracy of our world-leading facial age estimation and we will soon be releasing a new ‘Jan 2023’ model with improved accuracy across all skin tones and gender for those aged 6-70. At Yoti we constantly strive to improve all our services given our commitment to tech for good, and given the growing market importance of these services and increasing regulatory engagement. For example, coming soon we’ll be introducing multiple, concurrent age estimation models, which will help improve accuracy even further, whilst still completing a check within seconds.  We will also continue to update

3 min read
Woman using Yoti's age estimation solution at the self checkout in a supermarket

Yoti digital age verification trialled at supermarkets

Last year, UK supermarkets – including Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and The Co-op – trialled our digital age verification at self-checkouts in a scheme run by the Home Office. During the trial, shoppers in participating stores could try two new ways to prove their age: Facial age estimation technology: shoppers purchasing alcohol looked at a camera on the self checkout and age estimation technology estimated their age. A privacy-preserving solution, it didn’t require any personal details or ID documents, and all images were instantly deleted once someone received their estimated age. If the system detected they looked younger than the set

4 min read
Yoti & instagram logo lockup

Helping Instagram provide new ways to verify age

Anyone who tries to edit their date of birth on Instagram from under the age of 18 to 18 or over is asked to verify their age. They can either upload their ID (which is powered by Meta) or use Yoti’s facial age estimation technology. This was first introduced in the US and has since expanded to the UK, Europe, Brazil, India, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and Japan. Meta’s approach to age verification In 2019, Instagram began asking people to provide their age when signing up for the platform. Since then, they’ve continued to ask people for their

4 min read

Future plans for Right to Work and Right to Rent guidance

In December 2021, the Home Office announced that from April 6th, there would be changes to the guidance for completing right to work and right to rent checks.  Advice was amended at the start of the pandemic to allow right to work checks to be performed via a video call – following feedback from organisations, this temporary guidance has been extended until September 30th.  The updated Right to Work guidance will come into effect on 6th April, a new scheme under the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Identity and Attributes Trust Framework. The aim is to develop the

2 min read