How to Find the Right Identity Verification Service for Your Business

 An identity verification service helps businesses reduce fraudulent practices, an outcome of which is also the alleviation of risks that appear during online transaction processing. Moreover, you can experience a considerable decrease in customer onboarding expenditures, a parameter that falls in line with domestic and global anti-money laundering requirements.

Banks, financial institutions, retailers, sharing economy players, payment gateways, gamblers, and cryptocurrency exchange portals are some of the many parties which use identity verification solutions.

Whether you're searching for an online identity verification tool for the first time, or are switching providers, there's a lot to consider before signing on the dotted line. Let’s take a look at some of the factors you should consider when hunting for the best identity verification provider.

Does My Company Need an Identity Verification Tool?

First things first, determine whether your business actually needs an identity verification solution. Consider asking yourself these questions:

·       Does my company need protection from fraud?

·       Is it essential for my company to abide by anti-money laundering regulations?

·       Does my company need to verify the legal age of consumers (such as 18+ years)?

·       Is my company overspending on customer onboarding (for instance, running a branch for user onboarding)?

If you answered YES to any of these queries, it certainly means that you need an identity verification solution.

Steps to Choose an Identity Verification Service

With all that being said, here are the three steps that you must take before selecting an identity verification platform for your company.

Step 1: Evaluate your business needs and processes

Keep in mind that not all use-cases need the same level of security and authentication. For example, if your use-case relates to a simple verification of individuals visiting your workplace, you don’t need an extensive set of information for verification. Biometric fingerprint verification and identity document scanning will perhaps do the job, without the need for additional checks.

On the other hand, if you're a financial institution looking to provide innovative kinds of loans as part of your services, you’d need a more complex data set to further verify an individual and validate with multiple data sources.

The focus here should be on asking the right queries. You need to conduct an internal evaluation to determine what set of information your business needs to verify the user. For example, if your use-case is related to entering nightclubs, liquor shops, and gambling –where the business needs to ensure their users are of legal age –you don't need facial recognition and only require an identity document to confirm the customer’s identity. Therefore, you don't need to include that needless step.

Businesses often assume that extra features will enhance their user’s journey. Sometimes it turns out to be the opposite, and it only generates friction in the whole process.

Step 2: Determine the perfect balance between security and user experience

After your business appropriately assesses its requirements, a significant aspect of the verification process comes into play. How to ensure a user’s identity is valid, while also providing a smooth user experience?

You need to achieve a balance between carefully designed user flow and the risk of fraud. The incentive to scam the identity verification process is much higher if the outcome is access to other customers’ bank accounts, instead of access to their social networking accounts.

Keeping this in mind, businesses need to be able to identify the value of their service to the customer and acclimatize their processes and user flow accordingly. For instance, within the facial recognition system, you need to establish a certain threshold. Any match with a score resulting above the confidence threshold would be considered a match. Likewise, everything resulting below would be excluded.

This clearly influences the error rate, the validity of the tool being considered, and eventually the user experience. If the threshold is too high, even the good matches will most likely be excluded. Similarly, if the threshold is too low, a company risks having too many false positives, uncovering more vulnerabilities in their system.

It's essential to design every step of the process while remaining secure and providing a great user experience. That’s because ultimately, it all boils down to how the users respond to the journey in front of them and how quickly they will complete it.

Step 3: Track customer habits and behavior

Companies need to remember the significance of an omnichannel presence and how it influences their customers. Considering the customer’s habits and whether they are using mobile or desktop platforms is critical for the overall experience.

Before you implement a verification process, it's indispensable to find the right fit for every channel that your business is using. It's significant to think about the unique features and challenges of each platform and fine-tune the verification process accordingly. Listening to the customers, taking their pain points seriously, and acting on their feedback is crucial. Process consistency must be guaranteed in both, mobile-first or desktop-first strategies.

Choosing the Most Important Features

When selecting an identity verification solution, businesses need to do exhaustive market research. Here’s a list of features that must be considered when searching for an identity verification tool.

1. Technology Stack

Identity verification providers provide their solutions in several forms. They’re keen to modify their offerings to suit the unique needs of a company. When a business decides the systems on which the verification process will be deployed, the queries about the development tools and the best way of integrating a third-party solution have to be answered.

The entire verification process can be packed into a software development kit (SDK), which is integrated within the current mobile application. Businesses should look for SDKs that serve as a simple plug-and-play solution.

Other forms include using a web service, such as in the form of an API library. In that case, the identity verification provider offers the company access to their system with an API request to further verify the received information about the customer. You can also embed it into any website for quick verification.

2. Real-Time Processing

When an identity verification tool includes more layers of identity attributes, such as mobile and device specification, IP address, or location, it produces a more concrete foundation for the business to assess risk.

Having the capability to verify a customer's identity right when they're in the process of procurement or registration has become a significant contributor to the overall security of the verification process. This is one of the reasons why Trust Swiftly tackles the processing of information in real-time.

By empowering our technology to work in real-time, we provide a valuable solution that synchronizes with leading applications to create a holistic view of identities with the most secure checks possible.

3. Compatibility and Interoperability

Each identity verification provider has its own rigorously defined steps and activities on how to verify an identity correctly. The regulatory framework necessitates certain industries to have a higher level of compliance when dealing with sensitive personal info.

Validating an identity with government databases, international watchlists, credit departments, or even mobile network operators serves as a reminder of previously centralized systems. Companies need to have a variety of different data sources to make sure information is valid.

To reduce fraudulent activities and provide a secure system, make sure that the identity verification provider you choose consolidates data sources.

4. Dynamic Development and Good Support System

Today, fraudsters are keeping up with the fast evolvement of identity verification technology. Therefore, select a provider that incessantly improves, innovates, keeps pace with the regulatory environment, and follows state-of-the-art UX trends.

It's significant to find a scalable provider that will be able to follow the business's growth internationally while maintaining the same levels of security. Recurrent and transparent collaboration between all parties is important to maintain a robust identity verification process. Your business should invest some time into examining the support services and levels included within the offered plan.

5. Pricing Model

Now that we’ve talked about key features and processes, let us explore the important aspect of pricing. One generally used pricing model is pay per verification. Whether the verification process being effective or not, each verification necessitates you to pay. At Trust Swiftly, our pricing for businesses starts at as low as $0.01 per verification.

The Next Step

There are countless great identity verification providers in the market. Still, it is not a one-size-fits-all kind of situation, and you should choose a solution based on your unique use-cases. If you are hesitant about which verification provider suits your business needs and your local regulatory requirements, we can help.

At Trust Swiftly, we offer 10+ verification types including SMS, Voice, ID, Document, Video, Social, Banking, and more. So you get the confidence to verify identity with the best method. Now you don’t have to worry about declines or lost growth due to your existing fraud prevention system. Our flexible identity verification platform will shorten the verification journey for good users, whereas a fraudster will need a longer one with a greater likelihood of an identity mismatch.

To know more about Trust Swiftly, talk to our team about what we can offer you, or sign up for a free trial.