Up to 5x less demographic bias than the next best global solution.
By Robert O’Farrell, CTO and Co-Founder
In today’s global digital economy, businesses must verify genuine customers quickly and securely, meet strict regulatory requirements, and prevent fraud. Accurate identity verification is essential to enabling seamless access to services across borders, building trust, and driving growth.
Facial matching biometrics, powered by AI, play a central role. But if these systems are not equally accurate across different groups – such as country of origin, gender, or age – they risk excluding legitimate customers and damaging brand reputations.
Bias in Biometrics
For biometric systems to be trusted, they must be fair. Facial recognition needs to deliver consistent performance across demographics without disproportionately impacting any group. If accuracy differs by ethnicity, gender, or age, legitimate customers risk being excluded – undermining both inclusivity and trust.
This is why independent benchmarks and standards matter.
- NIST IAL2 Compliance: ID-Pal’s platform meets the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2). This is one of three levels of identity proofing defined by NIST and provides a high degree of certainty that an individual is who they claim to be. Compliance demonstrates that our platform doesn’t just deliver accurate results—it does so with the rigor required by global regulators.
- NIST FRTE: The Gold Standard for Facial Recognition
The NIST Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) provides the most rigorous and independent assessment of facial recognition algorithms available today. Of particular importance is the FRTE 1:1 (one-to-one) verification test, which measures how well algorithms can correctly identify if a face matches the face you expected to answer the question: “Are you who you say you are?”. This directly reflects real-world applications such as customer onboarding, access control, biometric payments, and border security, where precision and reliability under varying conditions are critical for maintaining trust and compliance.
What makes FRTE uniquely valuable is its focus on demographic differentials – evaluating how algorithms perform across ethnicity, gender, and age groups. These insights allow technology providers to detect and reduce bias, giving businesses the confidence that their systems will work fairly for all users.
How ID-Pal Removes Bias from Identity Verification
“At ID-Pal, fairness and inclusivity are as important as accuracy and security. “
That’s why our biometric engine that has been proven in global benchmarks to deliver up to five times less demographic bias than the next best competitor worldwide.
This means our customers can be confident that identity verification works equally well for everyone – regardless of ethnicity, gender, and age groups.
How we achieve 5x less bias
Our facial recognition technology is tested using the NIST FRTE benchmark, which is the world’s most respected evaluation for facial recognition. This test doesn’t just check overall accuracy; it also measures how well the system works across different groups of people, like gender, age, and region of origin.
Here’s how bias reduction is achieved:
- Independent testing – The FRTE process highlights if certain groups are less accurately recognised than others.
- Targeted retraining – Whenever differences appear, the algorithm is retrained using more representative data
- Global data collection – New images and videos are gathered worldwide, across multiple angles and environments, so the system learns to perform equally well for everyone.
By repeating this cycle of testing, detecting gaps, and retraining, our solution has been proven in NIST evaluations to show up to five times less demographic bias than the next best competitor globally.
This approach comprehensively addresses the issues plaguing most other identity verification providers, struggling to effectively remove bias from their solutions
100% AI-Powered, Secure, and Standards-Aligned
ID-Pal is not only powered by advanced AI biometrics but also aligned to the highest standards of identity proofing. Our platform is NIST IAL2 compliant – one of three identity assurance levels defined by NIST – which means we establish with high confidence that an individual is who they claim to be.
By combining industry-leading accuracy with proactive bias mitigation, ID-Pal delivers identity verification that is secure, inclusive, and built for the global digital economy.
Beyond the challenge in fixing an identity verification solution that fails NIST’s FRTE standards: If your identity verification solution delivers different biased results depending on a person’s age, gender, or ethnicity, what message is that sending to your customers about your brand?
Take a closer look at how ID-Pal delivers secure, inclusive, and unbiased identity verification solutions.
