BEMO boosts identity protection using Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) play a vital role in communities worldwide, creating jobs, providing goods and services, and contributing to local economies. BEMO is on a mission to help SMBs do their best, make a positive impact on communities, and be more (hence the name “BE-MO”). To reach this goal, BEMO provides trusted security and compliance solutions and expertise to more than 620 SMBs across the US.

Enterprise-level companies typically have dedicated IT and/or security teams ready to protect their network and data. However, SMBs generally don’t have those resources in-house and may not be fully aware of the latest security threats. This lack of security sophistication has made SMBs a new favorite target for criminals. Fortunately, SMBs don’t need to become security experts to protect their businesses—BEMO has them covered.

BEMO provides security support to companies with up to 1,000 workers. Each SMB customer designates authorized user(s) to interact with BEMO during support requests. Designated contacts can initiate a support request anytime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. BEMO then takes steps to confirm the identity of the submitter before taking any action. Previously, when a customer support request came in, the company would use a digital interaction channel such as a chat or an email to verify that the caller was an authorized user from an organization managed by BEMO.

“I remember one year, we came back to work right after New Year’s, and a CEO called us to say his IT manager had left, and he needed us to grant admin rights to the new person. But we didn’t know the CEO or the person he wanted credentialed. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this real?’,” Bruno Lecoq, CEO and Chief Information Security Officer, BEMO, says. “We needed to verify that he was who he said he was and that this was a legitimate request. That takes time. But for him, it was a critical issue. He needed it resolved quickly.”

BEMO knew it needed to find a solution that didn’t rely on intuition, one that performed faster and more efficiently while reducing the risks and costs associated with managing end-user identities. It didn’t take long to identify a candidate.

Entrusting identity management to Microsoft Entra Verified ID

“We are a Microsoft shop, and we work with the Microsoft identity team. So for us, using the Microsoft Entra Verified ID service was a natural choice,” Lecoq says. “We don’t have to bring in a third party. It’s all there within the Microsoft solution.”

The BEMO team set out to develop a new verification process to use with its customers. The core goals included increasing accuracy, reducing verification time, and lowering total costs. The new tool was developed with Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID, a managed, verifiable credential service. BEMO knew that Microsoft products met BEMO’s extremely high security standards, a critical requirement for the new solution. In addition, the company appreciated that the solution is based on open standards, enabling organizations to build unique, user-owned digital identity scenarios to issue and attest identity claims, credentials, and certifications.

The team knew exactly which client would be the first to try it: BEMO itself. “We always say, ‘BEMO is customer zero.' Everything we do for our customers has been rolled out and used internally first. If we try something and feel the pain at BEMO, we know that the customers will feel that as well,” says Lecoq. That includes the issues BEMO experienced trying to verify customer identities using the old system.

The first iteration of the tool is a self-service help desk powered by Verified ID. With the new system, incoming callers are challenged to present a verifiable credential from their parent organization before proceeding. BEMO added the Face Check feature available in Verified ID. The facial matching feature enables enterprises to perform high-assurance verifications in a more secure and simpler manner at scale. Face Check adds a critical layer of trust by performing facial matching between a real-time selfie and a photo from a trusted identity document using the power of Microsoft Azure AI services. It then shares the match results with the verifier without revealing any sensitive identity data.

“We created a webhook for Microsoft Teams [to redirect incoming requests]. When somebody calls in and says they need to change a password, we’re going to send them to a BEMO help desk page. The customer can then verify themselves with their verifiable credential card plus a Face Check,” says Catalin Alaci, IT Administrator, BEMO. “After the verification is done, there will be a customer notification in Teams with some information about that process.”

Early indicators show great promise

BEMO introduced the tool on a limited basis in December 2023. BEMO opted to enroll only CEOs and IT administrators for the initial period. Since rolling out the solution, the average time for manual identity validation has dropped from 5.5 hours to just 30 minutes. That translates into a 90 percent process-efficiency gain for addressing customer issues. Based on early success, BEMO plans to roll out Verified ID to all customers in the future.

The new verification process greatly simplifies and expedites the process while strengthening protection against unauthorized users—a boon for both BEMO and its customers. “Security is always great when you apply it in layers, and this verification is an additional layer that we’ll be able to provide to our customers. It’s one more way we can help them feel secure,” says Jose Castelan, Support and Managed Services Team Lead, BEMO. “We’ll be able to say, ‘We’re adding this layer of security, so nobody can impersonate a C-level executive and send a request to us.’ That’s huge.”

Find out more about BEMO on LinkedIn.