ID-Pal, a leading provider of AI-powered identity verification, has unveiled a major enhancement to its ID-Detect document fraud detection feature, building more powerful defences against the latest wave of AI-driven digital manipulation and deepfakes. This technological development addresses what many in the industry, including UK government officials, see as the primary fraud challenge facing financial services.
The urgency for stronger controls is being felt across the financial crime and cybersecurity landscape, with a report from The Payments Association noting that 72% of firms rate fraud as their biggest concern for 2025. Regulators such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) are calling for robust mechanisms to combat synthetic identities and tampered documents. This regulatory push aligns with warnings from the UK government.
“AI is going to be a thing which will dominate the next four to five years of the fraud space,” UK Minister of State for the Home Office, Lord Hanson, explained at a recent London conference. “We need to use AI to be able to better identify where those criminals are operating [and] to better identify how we can prevent it. But also the criminals are going to be using AI to look at how better they can work to fool people, to confuse people.”
To counter this evolving threat, ID-Pal engineered its document-fraud detection feature to offer protection against four categories of presentation attacks, with the latest upgrade focusing on the enhanced detection of digital manipulation. This includes AI-generated forgeries, deepfake documents, and other sophisticated tampering that bypasses legacy verification methods. The feature employs an AI-driven document authentication engine that spots markers of manipulation, such as pixelation, texture differences, and pattern irregularities, flagging screen-based fraud immediately to divert it away from the onboarding flow.
The value of this strengthened detection capability has already been demonstrated by UK car financing platform Finset, which integrated ID-Pal to manage a rise in asset finance fraud. Within six months of deployment, the platform helped Finset prevent over £750,000 in fraudulent applications.
“ID-Pal’s solution has not only saved us a significant amount of money but has also dramatically improved customer satisfaction by creating a smoother, more secure onboarding process,” Graham Westwood, Founding Director at Finset, commented on the deployment.
The enhanced detection model is designed to reduce manual review and minimise false positives, offering compliance teams detailed insights and clear reason codes for faster, more confident decision-making. Rob Sheehan, ID-Pal’s Head of Product, said the enhancement ensures customers can keep ahead of the evolving threats.
Colum Lyons, ID-Pal CEO and Founder, added that with AI-driven document fraud representing the largest challenge the industry has faced, businesses must implement robust tools to detect and defeat fraud at every entry point while ensuring seamless compliance.