5 Key Market Trends in Identity Verification

The year 2020 has caused a dramatic shift in the business industry and our way of living.  The significant change post-COVID-19 pandemic is our extended relationship with technology. Looking a few years back, the things we considered ‘a thing of future’ have now become a ‘new normal’. Individuals and businesses are turning towards the adoption of digital channels and services to bridge the gap between ‘in-person’ and remote work.

With digitization comes the cyber threats and security vulnerabilities. To address these security challenges the demand for identity verification is increasing. According to the Mordor Intelligence Report, the identity verification market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.1% over the forecast period, 2020-2025. The new verification services are actively responding to escalating cyber threats and vulnerabilities in the organisations.

Blockchain-based Identity Verification

Technology is advancing and traditional methods are becoming outdated. Technology experts are introducing blockchain-based identity verification solutions for enhanced security and business operations. 

Identity verification is now very apparent in the financial industry and businesses where the individuals and businesses are required to open accounts, make online payments through digital channels, apply for loans and carry out other financial activities online. Apart from financial institutions, every organisation dealing with consumers online now requires to incorporate identity verification channels.

Adoption of BYOD trends in organisations drives the identity verification market

The adoption of ‘bring your own devices (BYOD)’ trend in the industry is driving the identity verification market. The BYOD concept gained more traction since the COVID-19 outbreak when the organisations were forced to operate remotely. With this shift in events, the medium and large-scale enterprises are striving hard to address the emerging security challenges while enjoying employee satisfaction and cost-cutting opportunities. 

Earlier, in March, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Agency (CISA) highlighted the cyber threats linked to ‘work from home’ as compared to in-office jobs. With a BYOD approach, there’s a potential vulnerability around virtual private networks (VPNs). The organisations are required to turn towards integral security measures. 

Biometric verification, especially facial recognition, is becoming readily available on the majority of the smart devices. In the upcoming years, identity verification will be the most effective and secure measure for employee verification. Biometric scanners and facial recognition technology will be widely used by the enterprises to verify and authenticate employee identity before granting access to corporate data through BYOD.

In addition, the payment industry has shifted from cash to mobile payments. And they already started incorporating AI-powered identity verification solutions to combat fraud in real-time and authenticate customer identity and transactions.

COVID-19 has observed a striking shift in the business processes and con-artists know this too

Digital identity verification is witnessing a spike in demand COVID, driven by COVID- 19 pandemic. Organisations and businesses have shifted towards remote work during the pandemic. This sudden paradigm shift has resulted in increased demand for video-conferencing tools such as Zoom. Though remote working is a new normal, we can’t deny the security challenges that come with this new trend.

While businesses are shifting technology capacity on digital platforms to alleviate the impact of the outbreak, fraudsters are exploiting the situation to capitalize on inefficient security checks. They are using chaos and confusions to trick the victims into frauds scams using email and SMS phishing scams.

COVID-19 Frauds

According to Checkpoint, more than 4,000 coronavirus-themed website domains have been introduced since January 2020. Some of them are with the intention of running email campaigns to trick victims into clicking the malicious links. In addition, online scams have trapped more than 16,352 victims in online shipping fraud during this pandemic, since the physical stores were closed – reported, the United Kingdom’s National Fraud and Cybercrime Reporting centre.

Online Fraudsters Steal £17m Over #COVID19 Lockdown https://t.co/PDSCXyX7O6

— Eric Vanderburg (@evanderburg) June 22, 2020

Apart from online platforms, Fintech lenders and banks have also witnessed a surge in lending fraud attacks during a pandemic. These frauds were declared as first and third-party application frauds and synthetic identity fraud (SIF). Digital businesses, therefore, need to be extremely vigilant in their customer onboarding and verification processes to detect and prevent application and synthetic ID fraud.

Furthermore, businesses with existing customers are highly susceptible to phishing attacks and account takeover frauds. Hence, organisations need to streamline their user authentication process to detect and prevent any possible identity fraud and avoid financial losses in real-time.