Future Strategies for Effective Identity Verification that Build, Not Break, Business

Overview

Identity verification is an increasingly complex and challenging issue for industries across all sectors, as the prevalence of and access to consumers’ personally identifiable information (PII) is readily available through public social profiles, public records, and data breaches. Cybercriminals have further exploited, and many cases complemented, that PII with well-crafted socially engineered techniques that have allowed them to not only take over identities but also manipulate and impersonate the individuals who own the identities they target. PII has become a source of contention, not just for consumers but also for businesses, as the storing of PII poses identity risks and opens businesses to regulatory scrutiny. PII also has become less reliable as a source for foolproof identity verification, as consumers often forget knowledge-based responses or inadvertently share PII that can later be used to circumvent traditional authentication methods. 

Recent research from Javelin Strategy & Research finds that consumers are increasingly aware of this paradigm shift, understanding that PII is not inextricable from their individual personas, as once thought. Consumers are warming to the idea that they must relinquish control to truly verify the authenticity of their own identities by allowing identity verification (IDV) methods to pull in physical and behavioral attributes that go beyond the consumers’ direct involvement or knowledge. This report reviews why and how successful IDV now must rely more on frictionless options for authentication, which improve not only detection of synthetic identities and attempts at establishing fraudulent new accounts but also the overall customer experience.