Asim Banerjee chuckled when asked about IDmission’s initial interest in sports venue space. That’s because there was nothing, said IDmission’s CEO. “We had no idea this space needed us,” Banerjee told SBJ.
That was until Aramark sought help with age and identification issues in recent years. IDmission started in 2011 and was born out of his idea of securely establishing identity through smartphones, which was beginning to attract more consumers.
Slotterback said Aramark learned about IDmission through another partnership. And that initial help started with a simple question: “Can you do this?” As mentioned earlier, Aramark was considering and experimenting with other self-service options. Slotterback pointed to, as an example, Aramark’s efforts to self-identify and pay at Coors Field earlier this summer using Amazon One contactless payments. However, this effort still required dialogue with people. Slotterback noted that both IDmission and Zippin are willing to spend significant development time on integration and bringing the technology to life for guests. “We came to his IDmission because they are flexible and nimble,” says Slotterback.
IDmission is now integrated with Cecilia.ai and Drink Command in the self-service space (previously integrated with TendedBar). He also worked with Wickett on the Browns’ Express Beer Certification program.
Katie Beattie, director of marketing for Aramark’s design and development team, added that the early stages of the pilot process require many “core” conversations, especially when working on a project that is created from scratch. When it came time for beta testing, Beattie said the team looked at numerous demos and screenshots, and even went through a sign-up process to see the user experience firsthand. “Essentially, for lack of a better word, we tried to break it down,” Beatty said. “Can I destroy this? The answer was no.”
What helped IDmission stand out even more was its profile and transaction security. The reason this works is because IDmission Passive Alive Detection. The system can tell the difference between a human face and an attempt at deception, such as a photo of a person, an image of someone’s face on a screen, or a person wearing a mask. Banerjee said it took him a year and a half for IDmission to create this feature with the help of his AI and machine learning. He said IDmission used about 1.5 million images as part of its training, half of them of live people and the other half of fraudulent activity. IDmission took this technology to Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas to test lifelike wax figures that the AI could distinguish from living wax figures.
Banerjee said IDmission has to retrain new models every two weeks to improve its AI capabilities, creating at least 60 new models in the process. “It’s a very tedious, long, drawn out affair,” Banerjee said. “But once you do it, it works.”
With a simple facial scan, users can enter a Zippin store, make a purchase, and quickly exit without having to take out their wallet or phone.Aramark