Every day, we perform hundreds of actions that require us to verify our identity and prove who we claim to be. Whether it is to log in to our email account, make a bank transfer, or book a hotel, the companies we interact with need us to authenticate our identity. This is identity proofing—the process of verifying the claimed identity of a person with their actual identity. Yet, despite stringent checks, it might be surprising to note that, in 2021, identity fraud claimed 42 million victims and $52 billion in losses.

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What Does Identity Proofing Mean?

Identity proofing authenticates a person’s identity and verifies a user before allowing them to access any service or application. Traditionally, online identity authentication has been managed with usernames, email addresses, and passwords. Today, a user’s identity is much more complex and involves multiple layers of information and verification, including identification documents, personal security questions, biometrics, and more. Together, these identity layers allow organisations to implement verification and authentication practices and effectively secure users and their data.

In the last few years, there have been significant data breaches that have exposed users’ sensitive information across the globe. Because of these genuine risks, the ability to verify a user’s identity is critical to your security infrastructure.

Types Of Identity Proofing

Implementing foolproof identity verification solutions is crucial to mitigate risk. There a few ways to proof a customer’s identity:

1) Knowledge-based Authentication: Based on creating security questions on a person’s favourite musician or the name of their elementary school. 

2) Database Verification: ID verification commonly involves providing driver’s licence or passport details. 

3) Biometric Verification: A more secure way to authenticate identities, this includes fingerprints and facial recognition.

4) Multi-Factor Authentication: MFA requires two or more factors of authentication to gain access to a resource. Beyond passwords, MFA might ask for a PIN, biometrics, facial recognition, or a one-time passwords (OTPs)

What Can Happen Without Proper Identity Proofing:

The consequences of lax identity proofing measures are grave. Beyond fraud, there’s also the risk of compliance failures and fines. It may also lead to the following: 

1) Money laundering: Ill-gotten gains are processed through financial organisations and cash businesses to make them seem legitimate.

2) Customer friction: Data breaches where consumer identity information is leaked will make you lose consumer trust and their business.

3) Damaged reputation: Once a company is breached, its reputation significantly takes a beating.

4) Device and Account takeover: It is easy for the cyber criminals to gain access to the confidential information of users and take over their data and devices.

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How to Choose A Good Identity Verification And Authentication Solution

Manual identity proofing is hard to scale for any system or website with access requests and can negatively impact the customer experience. Users with too many entry barriers will likely just abandon the website or application. This is why it’s essential to implement a system where users can self-verify their identity. An identity proofing system can automatically gather information and trigger access approvals. This ultimately reduces the manual effort required and speeds up the process of performing secure digital transactions for the end-user.

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By implementing identity proofing, organisations can set themselves up to offer secure systems to their users, making security a seamless part of their customer’s journey. It’s another step in protecting users from bad actors targeting weak identities as most cyberthieves go for low-hanging fruit — accounts with poor security requiring minimal time to access.

Moreover, the pandemic pushed most businesses to go digital; as a result, fraudulent activities have also risen dramatically. Increased security is the only way to protect consumers and businesses against cybercriminals, particularly in the financial sector. User experience is important, but ensuring their security online is essential.
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Now with automatic identity proofing, companies can pace up the process without any human effort and more accuracy. According to digital identity guidelines there are some key steps:

• Identity validation: It gathers proof from the person and checks if the person is legitimate, credible and accurate.
• Identity verification: it confirms that the person is genuinely who they guarantee they are.

Bureau's no-code platform for identity orchestration, helps businesses authenticate users and prevent fraud, without adding friction to the customer’s journey. Bureau platform combines pre-integrated device, persona, phone, email and behaviour intelligence from 100s of data sources. It allows the creation of a detailed profile of every user to perform real time, accurate identity verification and pre-empt fraud.

When a new user signs up or logs in, Bureau platform's no-code, drag-and-drop interface allows you to create workflows that intelligently combine insights from hundreds of data sources, including device, identity, and biometrics, to verify identity and assess the riskiness of a customer’s profile. 

Bureau Platform makes it easy to define rules that govern your customer journey and can provide real-time approval, rejection, or alternate decisions based on data on a user’s identity, persona, and device. It’s as simple as selecting your favourites from an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet. 

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Powered by Bureau's Platform

>A comprehensive set of workflows for resolution, validation, and verification requirements 

> Collects, validates, and assesses risk with updated intelligence powered by billions of identity and transaction records and attributes.

> Provides analytics solutions for risk assessment to isolate suspicious activity

> Device intelligence, document verification, Video KYC, custom risk models, and more.

> Workflow orchestration and decisioning capabilities for user onboarding or continuous access protocols.

> Robust consulting services to help your team adhere to compliant identity proofing practices.

Summing Up

As cases of online fraud and identity theft rise, the security of your business is constantly under threat. Understanding your risk appetite and implementing an effective identity proofing solution can improve your organisation’s security and prevent fraudulent users from accessing and breaching  your sensitive data. To know more, click here