The Niwot-based company Parascript was recently awarded a patent for new signature verification technology.
The company, which uses artificial intelligence for document processing, will use the patent to help businesses validate people’s identities, said Tatiana Vazulina, Parascript’s director of project management.
“We always improve our technology,” she said. “What we offer in the patent is an efficient technology which allows us to cover multiple use cases which were not feasible before.”
Now that many people are signing tablets in agencies and businesses, those devices can track how fast someone signs, the movement of their pen, the pressure, the sequence of dots used, and other parameters, Vazulina explained. The patent allows more data — biometric characteristics — to be used for signature validation.
“You capture those biometrics, and instead of losing them, you include them on the chip of a card or identity card, and it is always available as a reference point,” she said.
The new patent is multifaceted — it includes identity verification for self-serve kiosks, smartphones, tablets and computers. The technology also includes in-person verification for paper documents that are compared to signatures from identification cards.
One possible use of the patent includes remote customer onboarding and registration — someone’s signature is captured by a camera or scanner on a smartphone or another device, and that is compared with the person’s signature on their ID. Self-serve kiosks can do the same thing — capture a signature written on a pad, and compare that with ID.
“This technology just opens doors right now to a number of applications which could not be implemented before, or could be implemented with a loss of quality,” Vazulina said.
Parascript engineers and scientists have spent more than two decades providing signature verification software to banks, governments, companies and organizations around the world.
The company initially began as a division of ParaGraph, which was founded in 1989 by Boulder venture capitalists and scientists dedicated to artificial intelligence. After Parascript became its own company in 1996, its software was adopted by the United States Postal Service, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Post and Bank of America.
The company’s technology is used for mail-in voting in Colorado and across the country.
“We were even tested by Boulder County recently and we were not implemented — because we didn’t go through that stage yet — but we were tested, and the technology proved to be more accurate than the human curators,” Vazulina said.
Parascript’s software saves companies around the world more than $1 billion annually by automating many processes, she said.
