New Delhi, September 9: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Wednesday launched an Aadhaar Face Authentication Software Development Kit (SDK) and a dedicated sandbox at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, aimed at making biometric identity verification easier to integrate into digital applications.
The new tools are expected to benefit banks, fintech firms, insurance companies, government departments and other authorised organisations seeking to incorporate Aadhaar-based face authentication into their mobile platforms.The Face Authentication SDK will allow organisations to integrate UIDAI’s facial authentication capability directly into Android and iOS applications.
This could reduce the need for users to switch between multiple applications while completing identity verification.
The ready-to-use technology incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning-based liveness detection and anti-spoofing capabilities.
It is designed to support secure processing and encryption of authentication-related data and can operate on consumer smartphones.
UIDAI has also introduced a sandbox to provide developers and quality-assurance teams with a controlled environment for testing the authentication process before deploying it in live applications.
The testing platform will allow organisations to examine different stages of the process, including user provisioning, consent, facial verification, liveness checks, authentication, error handling and transaction validation.
Developers can also test situations such as network interruptions, timeouts, invalid digital signatures and attempted spoofing.
The initiative is expected to address a long-standing requirement of the banking and fintech sector for a smoother customer onboarding process within their own mobile applications.
Under the new model, a customer using a banking, insurance or investment application could potentially complete Aadhaar face authentication without having to move to a separate application, reducing the number of steps involved in digital onboarding.
UIDAI said its indigenous AI/ML-based face authentication technology, introduced in 2021, has processed more than 500 crore authentication transactions and has been adopted by around 200 organisations, including government departments, banks, NBFCs, telecom companies, brokerage firms and certification authorities.
The technology is already being used in services such as Digital Life Certificates for pensioners, beneficiary authentication under government welfare programmes, Aadhaar-enabled payments and e-KYC-based mobile connections.
UIDAI also launched a “Playbook on Ease of Onboarding” to guide organisations in the banking, financial services and insurance sector on joining and using the Aadhaar authentication ecosystem for identity verification of customers, employees and business associates.
The latest initiatives are aimed at strengthening digital identity infrastructure while improving convenience for users and simplifying technology integration for participating organisations.
