Zain Group has received the TelecomLead.com Innovation Leaders 2019 award for starting the innovative EyePay Cash platform in Iraq enabling refugees to cash-out their financial assistance via iris identification.
Zain Cash, its mobile wallet, money transfer, electronic bill payment, and funds disbursement service, has partnered with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and IrisGuard, a UK-based electronic payment solutions company, to ensure protection against fraud and improved accountability in transferring cash assistance to the beneficiaries of UNHCR.
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Currently over 120,000 vulnerable families in Iraq and approximately 30,000 refugees in the country receive cash support via UNHCR, with the agency disbursing over $60 million through its partners in 2018 alone.
The launch of iris technology for payment of cash assistance will improve identification accuracy, efficiency and speed. Only entitled refugee will be able to cash-out without any need for any other identification tools.
A streamlined disbursement process will aid UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations in Iraq who are targeting more than 1 million displaced Iraqis and refugees for cash assistance in 2019. Zain Iraq has 16 million mobile phone customers in the country.
By integrating the innovative iris technology in the registration and cash-out of assistance to Iraqi refugees, the disbursement process will become streamlined and secure and quick in comparison to the previous process which took over 15 days.
The on-boarding process for iris biometric capture is fast and simple – the IrisGuard imager captures a greyscale image of the iris, converting it to a reliable and permanent Unique Verifiable Identity (UVI) that is used for cross-matching purposes.
IrisGuard’s EyePay Phone is capable of authenticating identity within 3 seconds. This smartphone combines IrisGuard’s expertise in iris recognition technology with mobile capability, providing the world’s only one to millions iris comparison in real-time.
