Some years back, identity verification happened on a face-to-face basis. When clients wanted to open a bank account, initiate payments, or make large transactions, they did so in person. They often carried paper documents to the verification offices to prove that the information they were providing about themselves was factual and accurate.
Nowadays, processes have advanced. Forgotten are the days when customers had to physically present their documentation, like a passport, whenever they wanted to access their accounts.
Today, you can shop, bank, or access services virtually from any location with an Internet connection worldwide. All that will be required from you is your biometrics, like eye retina or fingerprints, which are with you all the time and answering simple knowledge-based questions like your birth date.
From dealing with fraud to promoting financial security, it has shown why it is necessary in this digital era. However, this is just an overview of what responsibilities identity verification carries. Therefore, to help you understand what identity verification is all about, this article will dive deep into other core roles of identity verification in this digital era.
So, let’s get started!
1. Combating Cybersecurity Threats
One of the most recognized roles of ID verification in our digital age is fighting cybersecurity threats. We live in a heavily computerized world in almost every aspect of our being, including healthcare. Thus, cybersecurity threats emerge every second of every minute.
Even a simple connection to the internet puts you at risk as a potential target to a hacker who can quickly gain access to your sensitive data and use it for criminal purposes.
However, identity verification offers rigid and robust security measures like biometric authentications that are hard to access, even for experienced hackers. This method requires you to provide individual traits like your eye retina or fingerprint to verify your identity before granting access to a system or service.
Thus, by employing it as a security measure, people become entirely safe from any cyberattack concern that hackers pose.
2. Helps in Dealing With Fraud and Identity Theft
Digital transformation is seen as a two-sided process in today’s business landscape. It has offered businesses both its good side and wrong side. One of its bad sides is that it is a hotspot for breeding malicious activities like fraud, identity theft, and money laundering if not regulated.
However, modern problems require modern solutions, and with such, there are various mechanisms that businesses have adopted to avoid becoming victims of such malicious activities. The most effective one is identity verification.
Businesses increasingly turn to identity verification, particularly the two-factor authentication(2FA) method, to combat fraud and identity theft. 2FA, a form of identity verification, usually requires customers to present two or more pieces of identity information to access services or products.
The identity information can be a bank card, passport, password, or face for facial recognition. With this information, businesses can certify their customers are who they claim they are before they give them access to their money, services, or sensitive data, thus leaving no room for impostors to maneuver.
3. Improving Customer Experience
Improving customer experience is another role of identity verification in our digital age. Customers are the core of any business, and in this current world, they are digitally equipped; thus, they usually demand instant intervention and solutions from businesses whenever they encounter a challenge.
With a seamless onboarding process, it becomes possible for businesses to guarantee their customers fast, convenient, and secure interventions. This can, in turn, lead to a bad customer experience and ruin a business brand.
To deal with this prevailing intervention demand from customers, businesses are adopting various identity verification forms to deal with it and help ensure their clients have a faster, safer, and more excellent experience.
4. Enhancing Financial Security
Another role of identity verification in this digital age is promoting financial security. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed minimized interactions among people, and as such, businesses had to resort to other suitable methods of transactions. This paved the way for the rise in e-commerce and online banking activities, making digital transactions a norm.
However, the structures at that time were insufficient to handle this unexpected increase in digital transactions. Thus, they exposed most businesses and financial institutions to potential financial threats.
As such, identity verification came out as a godsend tool to fill this prevailing demand of users and financial institutions like banks to access a safe and secure digital transaction environment. It helped banks with account opening processes and transaction completions by verifying and authenticating the identity of customers.
This act made it harder for fraudsters to create shady accounts that they could use for criminal activities.
5. Enhancing Global Connectivity
The current rate at which people connect with others online for various purposes, including business, is enormous. There is flexibility for one to easily transact and interact with another person from another part of the world.
While this is a significant achievement for all humanity, it adds up to a question of trust and the pressing need for assurances that you are familiar with who you are dealing with on the other end of online platforms.
Identity verification solves this stumbling block in our current business world. It can help you reveal the true identity of who you are about to interact with on online platforms.
Conclusion
Change is inevitable in humanity, so digital transformation is no exception. But with change comes both negative and positive impacts. What matters afterwards is how you control the opposing side and maximize the positive sides.
Identity verification is one of those mechanisms that has proven beneficial in such circumstances.
It has helped deal with cybersecurity threats, fraud, and identity theft while promoting global connectivity and ensuring financial security. Thus, it is high time for organizations and businesses to implement identity verification methods to witness all these benefits.
