How the IIFL Group used selfies to transform its attendance management system

Being an organisation in the BFSI sector, it was critical for IIFL to ensure systematic attendance punching of employees and contractors. With a workforce of over 16,000 employees and a few thousand contractors, IIFL was finding it challenging to ensure compliance. IIFL had a traditional finger print based solution for its corporate offices.

In the traditional fingerprint based solution, IIFL had issues such as high non-match rate to non-recognition of finger patterns. On top of everything, data protection law draft mandated not to store biometric patterns of employees locally.

The task of making attendance for its massive workforce fun and easy was assigned to the technology team. The IT team innovated by adopting a cloud-based cognitive service for recognizing faces. In this process, the employee and contractor registers their face once by taking a selfie. The registered user clicks one image on a custom android application on tablet and images are validated with registered coordinates using a cloud API algorithm. The attendance is displayed on the screen and is captured in real time in the HRMS system.

The combination of cloud based face recognition API and advanced backend algorithm to recognize user face with first time registered face coordinates results in seamless user experience. IIFL has also put in place geo-fencing for securing non-authorized access.

With the facial recognition solution, IIFL was able to remove almost the complete infrastructure footprint which was otherwise required to support the fingerprint based biometric solution. With the Wi-Fi based approach, IIFL was able to get rid of LAN cabling required to operate biometric devices. This has also helped in safeguarding the organisation against data protection violation by not storing PIIs (personally identifiable information) locally and instead mapping face pattern coordinates for running recognition algorithm. Earlier with the biometric based solution, the overall TAT for attendance to reflect was 24 hours against real time attendance capture using the face recognition solution. This has translated to enhanced user experience and transparent HR management.

For IIFL employees, the day begins and ends with a selfie!