Daijiworld Media Network - Mumbai
Mumbai, Sep 11: Opening a bank account, buying insurance, or completing digital KYC is set to become significantly smoother for customers, who will no longer need to juggle multiple applications for Aadhaar face verification.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) unveiled a new Software Development Kit (SDK) at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 on Wednesday, allowing financial institutions to embed face authentication directly into their native Android and iOS apps.
Until now, completing this process required customers to download and run a separate application, FaceRD, in the background. With the new direct-integration technology, the entire verification journey happens seamlessly within the primary banking or broking app, eliminating a cumbersome step for the end-user.
To support the financial sector in adopting this upgrade, UIDAI has released a ‘Playbook on ease of Onboarding’ to guide banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) entities.
The ready-to-use SDK comes equipped with artificial intelligence and machine-learning-driven liveness detection and anti-spoofing tools, ensuring that customer data is securely encrypted. It is designed to operate smoothly on standard consumer smartphones without requiring external biometric hardware.
UIDAI chairman Neelkanth Mishra highlighted that the technology allows partner businesses to run authentication locally on their own servers. This shift not only secures banks' local authentication processes but also reduces the continuous load and vulnerability on UIDAI’s central systems, which Mishra noted faces hundreds of cyberattacks daily.
To guarantee a glitch-free experience for customers once deployed, UIDAI also introduced a dedicated sandbox environment. This allows corporate developers to rigorously test and simulate various scenarios—such as network timeouts or spoofing attempts—before rolling out the feature to the public.
Initially launched in 2021, UIDAI’s indigenous face authentication technology has already been adopted by nearly 200 entities and was recognised with the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration in 2023.