What is Failure to Enroll Rate (FTE)?

Failure to Enroll (FTE) tracks the frequency at which an onboarding flow is unable to generate a valid biometric reference given a sample it successfully captured. Causes range from low image quality, jumpy or inconsistent frames, liveness failure, or document/face mismatch. The user experience is mired, and the support team is alerted.

To drive FTE down, provide clearer capture guidance (framing, lighting), more intelligent retake flows, and tuning of liveness prompts to the prevailing environment (document to selfie comparisons can also fail, in which case don’t put the user in an infinite loop, provide a graceful set of fallback steps as part of a wider identity verification journey). It’s also important to log the enrollment failure reason, and set thresholds by risk tier, not just one universal level.

Watch for fairness: break out FTE rates by device class, network bandwidth, geography, and other demographics. A diverging FTE rate in one segment is a symptom of a capture or policy deficiency to be remediated, or perhaps your next front-page headline.