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Identity Verification: Its Importance, Uses Cases and Theft Prevention

Identity by all means is the most unique characteristic an individual could possess. It serves as a credible source to validate customers for a business and helps prevent criminal activities while maintaining international standards. In the rapidly changing era of technology, everything is moving at an unparalleled speed. To fulfill the needs of the digital space, online enterprises are striving hard to strike the right balance. Other industries such as online gaming, e-commerce & retail, and the medical sector are also moving towards digital identity verification solutions to compete with their market rivals.

The Harms of Identity Theft

With the omnipresence of digital systems, clever fraudsters are adapting to dubious ways and means to steal the identity of end-users. Identity theft involves impersonating someone else and using their personally identifiable information for your personal gains or harming a person’s reputation. The yearly statistics report published by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) states that almost $1.7 billion is lost in online identity fraud incidents with almost 651,000 complaints related to identity theft yearly.

Identity theft is a serious cybercrime and has strict penalties all over the world. To prevent potential identity theft, financial regulatory organizations like the European Union (EU), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have chartered hefty non-compliance penalties. Identity theft could be prevented by practicing AML policies and KYC/KYB regulations published by certified institutions.

Use Cases of Identity Verification

Identity verification has applications in online business. A few of them are explained below:

Identity Theft Detection

Identity VerificationThe best means of preventing identity fraud is to perform identity verification of your end-users or customers. This creates better prospects for protecting your customers from the potential loss of sensitive information and safeguarding their identity. Identity verification solutions act as a deterrent against impersonation and other security threats that compromise customer loyalty for an online business.

KYC, KYB, and AML Compliance

Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB), and Anti Money Laundering (AML) are official regulations practiced by online businesses to ensure secure customer onboarding, safer business relationships, and prevent criminal and terror financing. The AML directives issued by the EU regularly updates financial law enforcement standards to defend against novel threats arising from cybercriminals. Identity verification solutions provide online businesses to verify their customer effortlessly at the comfort of their homes, associate safe and secure ties with other business entities and keep away bad actors from their organization.

Customer Onboarding

For enterprises, customers act as a driving force for business operations and activities. A business cannot exist without customers and the same applies when it comes to the digital domain. Today, online businesses, with the help of identity verification systems, are on the verge of taking out traditional methods of onboarding customers which takes long and tiresome verification procedures.

Other Related Applications

Identity verification helps businesses reduce their operational expenses by replacing manual verification tasks with automated procedures which not only create ease of access for the customer but also for the business to create better prospects for revenue building. Apart from this, identity verification at e-gaming sites could be helpful in providing protection for minors by offering them age-tailored content suitable for their discretion. This is particularly useful for gambling platforms that require certain age limits to avail of services.

Products of Identity Verification Services

Identity verification has a number of products, a couple of them are below:

Biometric Authentication Services

Face verification solutions allow verifying customer identity through means of biometric facial recognition. This technology is not new but has been constantly emerging for the past years. An identity verification system integrated into the platform via. means of an API saves faceprints of end-users to perform future verification during checkouts and other important account activities. In a similar way, fingerprint and retina biometrics take into account unique fingerprint patterns and complex eye structures to perform identity verification of potential clients.

Document Verification

Government-issued identity documents provided by the user are verified against their facial identity to confirm their originality in document verification. This allows businesses to know their customers are reliable and have genuine identities.

To sum it up, identity verification essentially reduces identity theft and its causes, provides KYC and AML standards, and has applications in major industries.

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