Sumsub is pairing new Singpass-powered onboarding tools with an academic deepfake research project in Singapore, putting the country’s national digital identity system at the centre of its latest product and R&D plans. At the company’s inaugural What The Fraud Summit in Singapore, Sumsub introduced Singpass connectivity for its Non-Doc Identity Verification offering and signed a research collaboration agreement with Nanyang Technological University focused on watermarking personal images.
On the commercial side, Sumsub will act as an integration layer for businesses that want to authenticate customers through Singpass rather than collecting identity documents directly. Eligible firms — those registered in Singapore with a valid UEN and approved by Singpass — will be able to trigger “Login with Singpass” flows that draw on Myinfo and other government-backed data sources, aligning KYC checks with Monetary Authority of Singapore anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules as well as the Personal Data Protection Act.
For individuals, the experience is framed as a mobile-first, document-free onboarding journey. Customers scan a QR code, approve the request in the Singpass app using biometrics or a six-digit passcode, and consent to share verified profile details from government systems. Sumsub says the model can cut average verification times from around thirty seconds to roughly 4.5 seconds, with internal figures pointing to up to a 53 percent reduction in processing time and a 35 percent uplift in successful approvals.
The research initiative with NTU sits under Sumsub’s AI Academic Program and aims to make it harder for fraudsters to recycle people’s photos in deepfake or face-swap attacks. The partners plan to explore human-imperceptible watermarks that can be embedded into personal images, a response to what Sumsub describes as a 158 percent year-on-year increase in deepfake fraud in Singapore in 2025 and to the wider availability of generative image and video tools.
For risk leaders, the twin announcements underline how state-backed digital identity platforms such as Singpass are being wired directly into private-sector onboarding flows, and how vendors are funding preventive controls further upstream in the attack chain. If watermarking techniques prove resilient at scale, they could complement liveness checks and biometric verification as part of layered defences against synthetic identity abuse.
Sources: PR Newswire, Sumsub, Tech EDT
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
