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Identity verification has become increasingly common for consumer applications. From onboarding new banking customers to account recovery, identity proofing is one of the most effective methods for increasing assurance. Identity verification is the process of confirming who a user is by examining their government-issued ID card to ensure it’s valid, untampered, and a biometric match with the individual.
Identity verification (IDV) elevates trust and reduces risk in account opening, compliance, account takeover prevention and account recovery. Using manual IDV for account recovery is nothing new, but automation and AI offer significant benefits over slower, traditional methods.
Let’s look at how identity verification helped one company enhance recovery flows for better user experience, less friction and lower costs.
Well-intentioned controls cause unnecessary friction. That’s the challenge that brought one web hosting and site builder service to the realization that their methods for account recovery resulted in customer drop-offs, costly overhead and frustrating friction.
In their original flow, the company would allow customers to select from several options to recover their accounts. This was a relatively simple matter if they still had access to their email address. However, the process was much more difficult for customers who couldn’t access their email accounts.
First, they were asked to produce the original credit card info associated with their account, which is already a big ask for customers who made their original purchase years prior and likely forgot which one they used. Failing that, they would need to show a government-issued ID, which was checked manually by a full-time staff member. The turnaround time could be nearly a week, keeping the customer locked out for too long.
By offering AI-powered identity verification as a single recovery step, the company could eliminate overhead, decrease drop-offs and reduce the amount of time to verify identities to mere minutes. They effectively recovered lost revenue while shaving down operating costs.
As we illustrated in the example above, eliminating the need for manual identity verification reduces costs, enables a greater level of self-service and creates a seamless end-to-end experience. Instead of waiting five days for a response, customers only need to wait less than a minute.
The process is quite simple. A customer scans their legitimate identification and takes a brief selfie video. By using an array of liveness-detection techniques, biometric matching and authenticity verification protocols, the IDV service can confirm the identity of a user just as accurately as a trained human — if not significantly more. This is also significant because it allows the organization to cross-reference the identity with its records.
Here are just a few of the benefits identity verification provides:
Remember that identity verification harnessing powerful AI achieves only part of its promise if it operates in a silo. Identity verification can offer many more game-changing advantages as a service orchestrated by a comprehensive CIAM platform.
Threat detection runs within each verification session when combined with a real-time risk engine. Risk indicators are provided to gain higher assurance of the user’s identity. Progressive profiling builds a history of user behavior and device characteristics to detect anomalies better and allow more accurate step-up authentication — while leaving legitimate users undisrupted.
Supporting identity verification with a unified platform enables seamless and frictionless end-to-end user experiences, from account opening to recovery. Meanwhile, while most organizations build identity ecosystems from multiple vendors, most acknowledge that integration can be burdensome. Weaving your identity verification into other services, like passwordless authentication or a policy engine, is easier and more effective when they’re all components of the same extensible platform. Crucially, this reduces the overhead of an additional identity vendor.
Transmit Security makes integration easy whether you’re starting from scratch or adding our services to an existing identity stack. Ease of integration ensures your solution plays well with your user experience without committing to unnecessary costs or changes. Meanwhile, authentication tools and an adaptive risk engine are waiting to plug and play with your identity verification service.
See it for yourself by testing our extensible solution within a day.
