It’s plain to see that the digital landscape has permanently altered the way we do business, and predominately for the better. But new technological advancements also give rise to new challenges, and within the online world, identity verification is one of the most crucial and difficult problems to solve.
Rewind the clock 175 years and identity verification involved little more than walking into a store, bank, or pharmacy of your tiny town and being immediately recognized by the clerk. Up until the e-commerce boom of the mid-1990s, proving your identity still only required basic documentation like driver’s licenses, dates of birth, or home addresses—but today’s digital marketplace moves fast, and today’s businesses need equally quick and seamless tools to keep pace.
The Basics of Identity Verification
Rather than discuss identity verification as an abstract topic, let’s delve into the gritty details of what identity verification is, who can benefit from the process, why it’s necessary, and how, when, and where to get started.
What is identity verification?
Identity verification is the process of validating a consumer’s identity during the purchase process, oftentimes without their physical presence. Identity verification is a must-have tool for brands that do business online because it protects both your brand and your consumers.
There are several methods of identity verification, which include but are not limited to:
- Identity document verification
- Consumer data verification
- Dynamic knowledge-based authentication
- Biometric authentication
Who needs identity verification?
If your business sells online, you need identity verification support. From financial services, gaming platforms and age-restricted commerce to educational organizations, healthcare providers and retailers, anyone who utilizes e-commerce in their daily business needs the protection of identity verification.
When do you incorporate identity verification in the buying process?
Depending on your brand’s industry, the point at which identity verification is necessary can fluctuate. For healthcare organizations, identity verification is used to help patients access their private health records. Educational platforms might require customer credentials to gain entry to online classroom portals. For retail and e-commerce brands, identity verification is a key component of the customer purchasing process.
Where do you incorporate the identity verification step?
Identity verification is first encountered by consumers during account creation and then again any time they wish to log into a private or secured account. This means that you can fold identity verification tools directly into your onboarding or purchasing process on your website with no need for redirection to a third-party provider.
Why does my business need identity verification?
As interactions and processes are increasingly digitized, recognizing and authenticating consumer credentials to prevent fraud and maximize customer satisfaction is a high stakes game, and your brand needs to ensure it comes out a winner. This year 2.64 billion people, or one-third of the global population, has shopped online, and this number will only continue to grow.
If your brand wants to compete within the e-commerce market, you need to know who you’re doing business with. Thorough identity verification not only protects customers from fraud, but it also protects your bottom line from chargebacks, provides highly insightful analytics that can be used to create profitable marketing campaigns, and keeps your business safely compliant to Know-Your-Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and HIPAA regulations.
How can I incorporate identity verification to my business’s website?
Incorporating identity verification into your business’s website doesn’t need to be an overwhelming task. You can invest in ready-built, customizable authentication solutions that take away the time, energy, and stress of creating and maintaining an in-house system.
EVS delivers seamless electronic identity verification services with BlueAssure. BlueAssure is our robust identity verification platform that lets you layer the fraud prevention solutions you need to create the tangible results you want. Choose our document or consumer data verification tools or use a combination of the two. For even better results, add Dynamic Knowledge Based-Authentication and phone verification to ensure customers are who they claim to be. With BlueAssure, you’ll never have to choose between convenience and compliance. Whatever you need, EVS has the answer.
With the BlueAssure platform, you can use our intuitive web portal to set detailed thresholds using industry-leading customizable controls. Because BlueAssure is both Cloud-based and has API-integration capabilities, you can seamlessly integrate it with your existing platforms. You can also perform batch transactions and make real-time changes that immediately reflect in your native applications.
Best of all, when you choose EVS as your compliance partner, you’ll have direct access to U.S.-based product support to answer any questions or address any concerns.
What challenges does BlueAssure solve?
The modern consumer has an extremely large digital footprint that spans multiple years or even decades. This online information can easily become outdated, resulting in poor-quality data that leads to ineffective identity verification and declined customer trust. Low-quality identity verification data can also lead to financial loss and open your business up to compliance violations. BlueAssure from EVS solves this issue by tapping more than 5,000 individual data sources to make sure that the identity verification data you’re relying on is accurate and trustworthy. Using such a large aggregate of high-quality data allows BlueAssure to match data at a very high level and maximize the integrity and reliability of our identity verification solutions.
BlueAssure also comes with an optional, fully integrated watch list screening functionality, so even the largest, most international of brands can use the EVS platform to identify high-risk individuals and entities that might be connected with financial cybercriminals.
Reach out today to learn more about which of our modular, intelligent identity verification solutions are right for your brand. Create the solution you need with BlueAssure from EVS.
