Identity Verification
What is Identity Verification?
Identity verification is a necessary process that ensures a person’s identity matches the one that is supposed to be.
It ensures that there is a real person behind a process and proves that the one is who he or she claims to be, preventing both a person from carrying out a process on our behalf without authorization, and creating false identities or commit fraud.
When the organizations growing fast they need an IDV technology to identify their customers and reduce fraud risks. There are various methods and systems for identity verification. ID verification can be either electronic/automated or traditional/manual, which makes the process look different depending on which method is used.
Regulations and standards in identity Verification
Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules are driving the development of identity verification techniques throughout the world. These rules are mainly seen in financial sectors (banking applications). For example, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN) is one of the many agencies responsible for regulating identity verification methods in the United States.
KYC
KYC or “Know Your Customer” can be defined as the process of verifying a customer’s identity. In KYC, each client is required to provide credentials such as ID documents in order to use a company’s service.
KYC practices can be developed both offline (in person) and online (remotely). Here is where we can discern KYC evolution towards eKYC (Electronic Know Your Customer). (more details: https://www.electronicid.eu/en/blog/post/what-is-ekyc/en)
AML
AML practice is broader than KYC, and it refers to measures used by financial institutions and governments to prevent and combat financial crimes especially money laundering and terrorism financing.
Identity Verification Techniques
- Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA): verifies a person’s identity by requiring an answer to security questions. These questions are generally designed to be easy for that person to answer, but difficult for anyone to answer.
- Two- Factor- Authentication : verifies the person’s identity by using 2 forms of identification methods. Most of the times these 2 factors are in the form of something you know and something you have. As an example, the first factor is a password and the second commonly includes a text with a code sent to your smartphone, or bio metrics using your fingerprint, face, or retina.
- Database Methods: This method uses data from a variety of sources to verify someone’s identity. It may include online databases from social media(Facebook, google, LinkedIn) as well as offline databases (organization databases).
- Online Verification: This method verifies a user by government issued ID with the bio-metric features. This verification method typically requires users to provide a picture of themselves holding an ID, thus ensuring the person on the ID is the same person holding the ID.
Identity Verification Vendors
In the current world the security and privacy are the biggest concerns for most companies. So there are may companies and systems that provides the Identity Verification facilities for companies. I have listed some of those.
1. IDEMIA- Augmented Identity :
Idemia ensures the security of payment services in financial sector by using bio metric authentication and verification. It provides many sub services under for mobile user on boarding & authentication and bio metric authentications. The main verification technologies they provide are , ID document, Fingerprint, Selfies (compared with the ID doc), Video, Behavioral analytics, voice etc;
2.Jumio
“Jumio is an online mobile payments and identity verification company that provides card and ID scanning and validation products for mobile and web transactions, which they sell as “Netverify Trusted Identity as a Service”.”- Wikipedia. Some features and functionalities of Jumio are Jumio Id Verification, Jumio Go, Jumio transaction monitoring, Document Verifications, Jumio Authentication (ith biometric, KBA, 2FA) etc;
3.OnFido
OnFido are Experts in fraud and AI and Bio metric Customer Authentication It protect against stolen IDs and impersonation by using a score based similarity check for image in id and selfie image. Key Services of OnFido are Document Verification , Bio metric verification (combining a person’s ID with their physical biometrics, selfies, videos) , Age Verification and Fraud Detection.
Other than above, There are many Identity Verification Service providers like Acuant, socure, ID.Me, Experian, Caisson ID check etc;
As a conclusion let’s look at what are the main benefits of Identity Verification. Main advantages are it maintains and improves the reputation of company or service, avoid costly fines, avoid costly charge backs, Avoid Fraud and Money Laundering Concerns, Improve Customer Experience etc.
Thank you all for reading my article on identity verification. I look forward to meeting you in another interesting article.😎️
