A two-man team from Lloyds TSB has won top honours at Microsoft's week long Digital Wallet Foundry identity and loyalty hack-a-thon in London with a proof-of-concept application to ease customer verification at the check out.
Digital project manager Jay Bashir and digital graduate Ravi Jain from Lloyds worked over the five-day event to create the application, dubbed Verify Me, which identifies customers at the point-of-sale, such as when they sign up to a mobile-phone contract.
Verify Me resides on two phones; the merchant's and the customer's. A button within the customer's application, when clicked, connects to Lloyds' ID-checking service, which itself is connected to Experia and credit checking software.
Depending on the result of the check, the application then returns either a verified or unverified response in an encrypted format. The merchant decrypts the response and completes user verification via his phone. The Lloyds product also contains additional loyalty services for verified customers.
Fresh from picking up their award, Bashir and Jain - who now plan on taking the app back to Lloyds to develop further - sat down with Finextra to discuss Verify Me and the hack-a-thon experience: