ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, today announced that TrustID of Reading, UK has chosen ABBYY FineReader Engine to help process national driving licences as part of its identity validation solution. Using ABBYY’s optical text recognition and document conversion technologies, driving licences are converted into readable content which is suitable for automatic data verification.

ABBYY FineReader Engine is integrated into TrustID’s TVS system. Once a document is scanned, the system identifies it as a UK driving licence and then reads the required data fields such as name, date of birth and document number. This data is then validated and checked and the results presented to the user to confirm whether or not the document is acceptable. The solution is used in a variety of scenarios for checking the identity of staff and customers, for example:

In local government agencies for checking the identity of housing applicants and other benefit claimants
For banks and other financial service providers who need to confirm the identity of their customers
At universities for checking that students have the right to study in the UK
In NHS Trusts to check staff and contractors entitlement to drive
“Increased legislation and regulatory requirements are putting many organisations under increased pressure to check the identity documents of their staff or customers,” says David Park, commercial director, TrustID. “Our range of identity document validation solutions help organisations to be more compliant at a lower cost as well as reduce fraud, increase security and protect brand. ABBYY OCR technology has improved the functionality of our solution, which in turn makes it more attractive to our customers.”

ABBYY FineReader Engine is a software development kit that gives developers, system integrators and BPOs the tools they require to integrate optical text recognition technologies into their applications. The ABBYY recognition platform delivers award-winning OCR, intelligent character recognition (ICR), barcode, checkmark, field-level/zonal recognition and PDF conversion enabling scanned documents and images to be automatically transformed into searchable and editable document formats.

“Industry leaders worldwide rely on ABBYY OCR technology to create a variety of applications in all sectors,” says Sven Diedrich, Director, Technology Licensing Business Unit, ABBYY. “Over two decades, our success has been built upon a foundation of trust in ABBYY’s proven technology and our commitment to innovative product development. We are proud to say that TrustID have chosen our SDK as a best-fit for their needs.”