Rodger Desai, CEO and Founder of Prove, explains what business leaders need to know about digital identity and how mobile phone-based identity verification can increase security while enhancing customer experience. This article is a primer on this emerging market to better help leaders navigate the dynamism of the cybersecurity space.
In today’s digital environment, when it comes to cybersecurity, CEOs face a common challenge – continuous requests to increase their company’s budget. Unfortunately, with new threats emerging every day – it never seems to be enough. The cybersecurity market continues to teach us to have zero trust in everything – and that there are never enough tools, technology, and education to fully protect a business and its stakeholders. With global cybersecurity spending projected to exceed $1.75 Trillion by 2025 (in a projection by Cybersecurity Ventures), it is clear that a very valid fear of bad actors is driving up operating expenses – as businesses work to keep hackers out while enabling a strong brand experience for their actual customers.
The result? This expensive security tech stack, frequently disparate and siloed, is often destroying the consumer experience with endless steps, barricades, speed bumps, and secret codes that inversely impact sales and customer satisfaction. The reality, however, is that most consumers are who they say they are when they show up at our digital doorsteps. They are moms and dads trying to remember passwords to file their taxes before dinner. They are building contractors that need immediate financing for a new job but would rather have a root canal than fill out a loan application in triplicate. There’s no doubt that we must keep the bad guys out, but not at the expense of a seamless, hassle-free experience for consumers. The digital identity market may hold the solution to this problem.Â
Security Should Be Easier for Consumers
With e-commerce on the rise across every industry – from retail to banking –, there is a relentless battle between securing our online services and making them easy to use. This is where digital identity comes in. At its heart, digital identity is the ability to create a VIP lane for legitimate prospects and customers while simultaneously thwarting fraudsters. As a result, the reduction in friction supercharges revenues and growth without compromising security.
But what enables these more streamlined experiences and makes them different from traditional identity verification processes like passwords, scanning an ID, or remembering the make and model of your first car or your mother’s maiden name?
The Solution is in Your Pocket
The key lies in leveraging mobile phones that most adult consumers already have at their fingertips. Mobile phones are unique in their ability to serve as a secure proxy to our digital identity not only because of their ubiquity (they are penetrating markets faster than any other technology in our history and are with us always) but also in the fact that they have built-in encryption (the SIM card). Therefore it makes sense that phones and phone signals can act as a close digital proxy to our physical identities – the closest possible proxies today. These signals and the technology platforms that can analyze them in a privacy-enhanced manner to determine whether it’s your customer trying to log in or not enable this more streamlined, secure customer experience so many crave.
See More: 3 Machine Identity Management Trends to Watch Out for
Phone-Centric Digital Identity in Action
Examples of mobile phones verifying identity are already in use. For example, Lowe’s makes it easy and secure to apply for a credit card – it’s instant for legitimate consumers and painful for fraudsters.
Another example – leading cryptocurrency exchanges also rely on phone-centric identity to improve their notoriously cumbersome onboarding processes, making them more accessible, faster, and safer. By tapping into the digital identity that leverages user phones and checks the legitimacy of phone numbers, many crypto exchanges are also protecting their users against theft of crypto assets. These improvements in security and accessibility will ultimately help crypto exchanges overcome two of the main barriers that currently stand in the way of mainstream adoption.
The Bottom Line for Businesses
When analyzed properly, phone signals have the added benefit of being much harder to spoof. Think of how easy it is for fraudsters to buy your passwords or SSNs to log into your accounts on the black market. To break phone-centric identity, bad actors would have to create a phone number, perform legitimate transactions and activity on that number for years, and associate it with legitimate accounts, which is possible but simply not worth the cost or effort for most criminals.
Phone-centric identity is also opening doors in the government, insurance, and retail sectors. As the need for instant identity verification and authentication grows with new applications – such as vaccine passports, biometrics in airport security, and checking out with your face at a metaverse shopping mall – digital identity is becoming more and more woven into our everyday lives and the public sector.
Today, we’re in the midst of an ever-escalating battle between fraudsters and companies, and unfortunately, the ultimate victim is the customer. Digital identity holds the key to building a brighter digital future where the same tools and technology that mitigate crime can also make experiences easier and faster for consumers.Â
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