How Effective Is Your Identity Validation System? Here’s How You Can Tell
Having an identity validation system in place that your business can count on provides serious benefits. The year 2020 gave fraudsters around the world a slew of new entry points into vulnerable business processes. A number of reports point to a potential increase in identity theft that could exceed 80% this year. Coupled with far more sophisticated forms of fraud surfacing in recent years, the threat to businesses is hard to overstate.
Making sure your identity validation system is truly effective can help in putting your customers at ease, reduce fraud, and help your organization with compliance and liability risk management. Here’s how you can tell if your provider is trustworthy.
How Accurate is It?
Accuracy is a factor of obvious importance, but many businesses fail to see what a seemingly small difference can make on their risk profile. For example, a 95% accurate solution may sound like a great option, but for organizations accommodating tens of thousands of customers or more, that percentage can prove deadly to the bottom line and their reputation.
The industry is also an issue. Executives of businesses operating in certain sectors, such as cannabis, are at risk of jail time as a consequence of non-compliance with ID validation regulations–even if they already had a security solution in place.
Simple solutions that rely solely on optical character recognition without fully parsing an identity document’s security features produce precariously erroneous results. Popular solutions of this type have been reported to have an accuracy of just 60% or less. Those numbers are not nearly enough to guarantee your business’s safety from fraudulent schemes and criminality.
Is It Fast Enough?
Today’s consumers are very impatient. They expect fast credit decisions, fast ordering, and fast delivery. This puts businesses in a precarious position. Or does it? Businesses feel that they need to decide between a good customer experience and the level of risk that they need to take.
Behind this is the concept that identity verification solutions take longer than customers have patience. In many cases, that may be true. Solutions with low accuracy on the first pass may add additional steps to try to raise their accuracy levels a bit. This may equate to additional data steps or even manual review.
Both of these steps can take the process offline and require that the customer come back or be notified later. However, solutions that have a fast and accurate first step can avoid this dilemma entirely.
Is It Adaptable?
Investing in a new identity verification system, and then having to buy new equipment is not ideal. This requires additional hardware and training expenses that you likely did not account for. In addition, having a system that is not flexible enough to connect into the systems and processes that you have is also a problem. This means that the process will be outside your regular process providing additional customer experience headaches, as well as additional gaps for fraudsters to sneak in.
While the first issue is one you want to avoid, its the second one that puts you at greater risk. Risk of creating process holes where your channels (e.g. online vs. retail) are unaware of each other. This might allow fraudsters to work hard at breaking into one channel while, even if that fraudster is stopped, the other channel is unaware and presents a new and open opportunity for the fraudster to resume his/ her efforts. Risk of turning customers off because of poor experience. As a result, flexibility is key to creating a powerful customer experience free of the type of holes that fraudsters seek to exploit.
YES to All Three
From a risk perspective, you will be most effective in reducing your fraud risk if your identity verification solution enables you to be accurate, quick and adaptable.
The Intellicheck platform can be put in place where you need it. It can be deployed as a free-standing web portal or an integrated API implementation that fits into your single or multi-channel process. Our sub-second results make submitting an ID easy and achieving validation practically effortless.
With a baseline of 99.9% Intellicheck lowers the risk to you and your customers.
