Unico builds cutting-edge IDTech with Spanner Vector Search

Unico is a leading biometric verification and authentication company addressing the global challenges of identity management and fraud prevention. 

With nearly two decades of experience in the Brazilian market, Unico has become a reliable supplier to over 800 companies, including four of the top five largest banks and leading retailers. Since 2021, Unico has facilitated more than 1.2 billion authentications through digital identity. It is estimated that Unico's solutions have thwarted $14 billion in fraud, by 2023. Valued at over $2.6 billion, the company stands as the second most valuable SaaS company in Latin America, backed by General Atlantics, SoftBank, and Goldman Sachs,  and was recognized as the third most innovative company in Latin America by Fast Company in 2024. 

Currently, working on its global expansion, Unico has an ambitious vision to become the main identity network in the world, thus moving beyond traditional ID verification and embracing a broader spectrum of identity-related technologies. In this article, we’ll explore how Google Cloud and Spanner — Google’s always-on, virtually unlimited-scale database — is helping Unico achieve this goal.

Why vector search shines in Unico's solutions

Unico is committed to delivering innovative, cutting-edge digital identity solutions. A cornerstone of this effort is the use of vector search technology, which enables powerful capabilities like 1:N search —  the ability to search for a single face within a large set of many others. This technology drives Unico’s identity solutions by retrieving and ranking multiple relevant matches for a given query with high precision and speed. 

However, developing 1:N searches poses a significant challenge: efficiently verifying facial matches within databases containing millions or billions of registered face vectors. Comparing an individual’s facial characteristics against each entry one by one is impractical. To address this, vector databases are often employed to perform Approximate Nearest Neighbor searches (ANN) and return the top-N most similar faces. 

Unico found that Spanner supports vector search capabilities to solve these issues, providing: 

• Semantic retrieval: Leveraging vector embeddings, Unico’s solutions can retrieve results based on deeper semantic relationships rather than exact matches. This improves the quality of identity verification, such as identifying relevant facial matches even when minor variations exist between the source and target images.

• Diversity and relevance: Using algorithms like ANN and exact K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) vector search balances the need for diverse and relevant results, ensuring high reliability in fraud detection and identity verification.

• Multimodal applications: Vector search supports embeddings from multiple data types, such as text, images, and audio, enabling its use in complex, multimodal identity scenarios.

• Hybrid search: Modern vector search frameworks combine similarity search with metadata filters, allowing tailored results based on context, such as region or user preferences.

By integrating vector search, Unico provides customers with faster and smarter fraud detection tools. Leveraging high-precision algorithms, these tools can identify fraudulent faces with exceptional accuracy, effectively safeguarding businesses and individuals against identity theft and other threats. This innovation not only solidifies Unico’s position as a technology leader but also underscores its mission to build a safer, and more trusted world by creating a unified ecosystem to validate people's real identities.

Some results

Operating at low latency while maintaining accuracy is crucial for Unico’s business, especially in applications that demand real-time performance, such as banking. Spanner was Unico’s first choice because its integrated support for vector search eliminates the need for separate, specialized vector database solutions. 

Spanner provides transactional guarantees for operational data, delivers fresh and consistent vector search results, and offers horizontal scalability. Its features also include GRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) support, geo partitioning, multi-region storage configuration, RAG and LLM integrations, high SLA levels (99.99%), and maintenance-free architecture. Spanner also currently supports KNN and ANN vector searches.

Unico currently operates 1:N services in Brazil and Mexico, storing more than 1 billion facial embeddings in Spanner to date. This setup enables Unico to achieve low latency at high percentiles, high throughput of 840 RPM, and a precision/recall of 96%. And it’s just the start — Unico processes around 35 million new faces every month and that number continues to grow.

Unico remains focused on growing its customer base, enhancing its existing products, and exploring new opportunities in international markets — with the aim of expanding the reach of its secure digital identity services beyond Brazil’s borders. With Spanner and the ability to tap into the full power of the Google Cloud’s ecosystem, Unico is confident that it can bring its ambitious vision to life and deliver innovative solutions that forge trust between people and companies.

Learn more:

• Discover how Spanner can transform your business.

• Get started on Spanner today with a 90 day free trial instance. Or try out Spanner Vector Search.

Learn how Spanner Vector Search, hybrid search, and Spanner Graph can supercharge AI apps at virtually unlimited scale.