Businesses that need to protect their reputation and secure their internal ecosystems find trust and safety extremely valuable. Businesses must be able to build quality relationships with complete strangers—their customers—while also reducing the risk of fraud and maintaining regulatory compliance. For most businesses, digital identity verification offers a solution to this growing problem.
How Trust is Threatened
Trust is threatened in different ways depending on the industry. With the banking industry, for instance, there are concerns that criminals are using stolen information to create synthetic identities in order to bypass banking security measures. In contrast, with the sharing economy, there are concerns that drivers on ride-sharing apps are who they say they are when they come to pick you up. For both industries, businesses must work diligently to ensure that their customers are who they say they are without having to directly interact with them.
Businesses must adequately vet new customers during onboarding in order to determine who they claim to be matches who they really are. This is especially important due to the rise of synthetic identity theft in online environments. Establishing a customer’s digital identity will help businesses protect their ecosystems, both online and offline.
Traditional identity verification methods such as two-factor authentication (2FA) and knowledge-based authentication (KBA) have been proven to be inadequate at addressing these concerns. They are problematic because KBA relies on knowledge that can easily be acquired through the internet. Social media has made it increasingly easy for criminals and nefarious characters to find the answers to KBA questions online. 2FA can easily be bypassed by criminals through phishing attacks or mobile network data interception. This makes both KBA and 2FA unreliable security protocols.
Besides the security concerns for these authentication methods, businesses also risk creating friction-filled experiences for customers if, for example, they do not have a smartphone available in order to complete a 2FA process. This type of situation can frustrate customers and cause them to lose trust in your company before your relationship has even started.
The Trust Problem
In order for businesses to succeed, they must address the needs of their customers. Most customers—especially millennials—do not want to sit through a lengthy, cumbersome and friction-filled onboarding process. Nevertheless, businesses must create secure onboarding processes without compromising on safety and compliance.
How can businesses do this? It is possible to build an onboarding infrastructure of trust with automated, digital identity verification. Identity authentication software will help businesses mitigate fraud and risk while also reducing friction for their customers.
Why Digital Identity Verification is the Answer
Digital identity verification solutions, like those offered by IDMERIT, allow businesses to create simple and streamlined onboarding journeys for potential customers. They are flexible services that help optimize customer conversions while also protecting consumer data and deterring potential criminals.
Curious how identity authentication software can be beneficial for your business? Below are five ways that businesses can reduce fraud and mitigate risk by using identity authentication software in their onboarding procedures:
- Request documentation: Your business can require that potential customers input a government-issued ID—such as a driver’s license or passport—for verification.
- Artificial Intelligence: Leverage the power of artificial intelligence to determine if the inputted customer ID is real or fake.
- Automation: Customer information is kept secure during verification by cross-checking it with information stored in official databases in the customer’s country of origin through an API.
- Biometric Comparison: Liveness detection is used to determine if the person holding the inputted ID is physically present during the onboarding process.
- Personal Information Extraction: During mobile onboarding, personal information can be extracted from identity documents and automatically inputted into appropriate form fields in order to reduce mobile form fill errors.
Conclusion
Trust is an important part of any business relationship. Businesses must work diligently to establish trust with their customers without alienating them. Shifting from unreliable methods of authentication for more modern and secure ones is one way to do this. Digital identity verification offers a variety of benefits for businesses looking to build better relationships with their customers while also maintaining compliance with governmental regulations. To explore how IDMERIT’s identity verification solutions can be of benefit to your business, please contact us for more information.
