There are very few organizations today that can avoid the need to digitize. Even in traditionally conservative industries like commerce and banking, the influence of digital-first, and easy to use platforms like Revolut, Transferwise, or OpenPayd, means that customers have become accustomed to rapid and pain-free user journeys while conducting online transactions.

Moreover, over the last twelve months, the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns have also accelerated most sectors’ engagement with customers digitally. That situation presents opportunities to companies to take advantage of digital solutions at the cutting edge.

Organizations are now asking themselves: How do you ensure your customers have a secure, seamless customer experience which gives them access to your product or service? How do you manage the different stages of a customer journey? And how do you personalize their experience while also protecting their data?

Situations that demand the highest security levels — such as identity verification and anti-fraud procedures — increasingly need to be fully digital, yet maintain and even improve high security standards.

Verification in the new normal

When we think about identity verification, we think immediately of opening bank accounts, applying for a passport or visa, or getting replacement driver’s licenses.

Digital identity verification is helping organizations flag cyber fraudsters who are busy exploiting the new need for organizations to operate remotely and digitally. And while agile fintech and banking providers are deploying powerful national and international identity verification platforms, they are not alone in leveraging new technologies in this area.

Across verticals, organizations are using remotely-hosted KYC (know your customer) services more than ever before and are seeing the significant advantages of iDaaS (identity-as-a-service) compared to in-house provisioning. Common use cases include fintech, insurance, and crypto but these are quickly expanding to include any company that would want to verify a user’s identity before giving them access to its products and services. This can include competitive leisure activities like e-gaming and home or car sharing platforms, etc. amongst many others. Companies use these iDaaS services to not only protect from fraudsters or software hacks, but also to offer a smooth and slick experience to their users.

In short, as more and more transactions take place online, companies can protect themselves, their brands, and their valued customers from fraud and infringements to data and identity laws while offering a top-notch sign up experience, which is now key to quick customer acquisition and scale.

The technological complexities

Even large national financial institutions have historically struggled to emplace the technologies required to prevent identity-based fraud. However, they are now able to leverage specialist eKYC / IDV vendors such as Onfido, that offers powerful, ready-to-roll services that are powered by AI and self-learning technologies that not only prevent identity misuse, but also improve onboarding and verification success metrics over time.

The first line of defense is a document check. Vendors typically offer a manual (analysts reviewing each document) or automated (algorithmic) approach. There are pros and cons to each – with the manual approach being slow and expensive, whereas the automated approach can be quick and cost-effective but with a high false rejection rate, which requires companies to then process a lot of identities manually. Onfido offers a hybrid approach that uses a combination of machine learning systems and humans to offer results in a speedy, accurate and cost-effective manner, while minimizing false rejection rates that are common in machine-only systems.

The second line of defense is typically a biometrics check — that is increasingly playing a larger role in helping to capture fraudsters at the point of onboarding.

Identity-as-a-service

At the end of the day, organizations are always asking themselves: are the people or things with which we interact the real deal? Furthermore, can we ensure that verified customers or prospects get high-quality experiences online that combine best security practice with smooth onboarding and verification processes? By partnering with identity verification experts, companies of all sizes can completely outsource identity verification, without having to build internal operational teams themselves to do the heavy lifting. This frees them up to focus on their core competency of bringing top notch products to their consumer base.

In a subsequent article here on Tech Wire Asia, we will showcase studies with digitally-leading companies that describe use cases combining end-user experiences with security & efficiency.

In the meantime, check out a short clip on how simple IDV can be. We will be back in a few weeks to share more about Onfido’s cutting edge work on proactively improving processes like best-in-class user onboarding, identity verification, KYC, and fraud detection.

*Some of the companies featured on this article are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia