Digital identity will unlock greater trust in the digital society, says Steve O’Malley, General Manager, EMEA, at the fraud prevention and authentication product company Callsign.
The pandemic has accelerated our reliance on online services, resulting in businesses and consumers being thrown into a digital-first mindset. But as our online presence grows, we are seeing a greater increase in the need to securely identify ourselves in the digital world. With the boom of apps like TikTok and mobile banking being our new normal, we need a better way to prove we are who we say we are online.
With the rise in scammers and fraudsters pretending to be trusted organisations online, trust is diminishing. Recent research from UK Finance found that more than £1.3billion was stolen by con artists last year via authorised push payment fraud. This begs the question – how are organisations successfully building trust between consumers and businesses, so they have faith in online processes?
Digital identity is the future. It will underpin everything we do online, especially as we continue to move towards a more digital society. It is the very cornerstone on which our digital society will be built, meaning we won’t have a successful digital economy without a safe and trusted way to verify that a business or person is indeed who they say they are. Understanding the value of digital identity will allow businesses to build better digital trust and faith in a secure online world, which in turn can also increase overall GDP, according to our recent research.
Enabling digital lives
Acknowledging the importance of a digital identity will unlock greater trust in online services, from social media to mobile banking. Certain organisations don’t verify online identities when users join their platforms, allowing bogus accounts and synthetic identities to be set up for rogue and abusive activity. Other businesses only focus on the first online interaction, such as a log-in to an online account, which means that consequential activity goes unchecked.
Technology has also generally looked to identify fraud rather than positively identify the person, prohibiting innocent users from accessing services when they’ve forgotten their log in details, or more worryingly, allowing fraudsters to access accounts that aren’t their own, with stolen usernames and passwords. Because a fraudster who knows a username and password doesn’t look like fraud.
All these approaches erode trust in the technology and processes currently used to authenticate us online and with it, trust in the interaction chain. As our online economies continue to grow, it is critical that we change how we truly confirm someone’s identity online and the technology we have today allows us to accurately identify genuine users – ensuring they are who they say they are – and let them get on with their digital lives.
What businesses can do next
For businesses to thrive in a digital society, and be an essential part of the digital ecosystem, leaders need to ensure they’re providing the right technologies to enable a safe and transparent digital world.
1.Secure an online presence
With the digital revolution in play, it is essential for business leaders to implement technology which confirms their customers’ identity online. This technology needs to address questions such as:
• Is this person a genuine user or a bot?
•Is the session or interaction secure or is there malware at play?
By asking these types of questions, organisations can ensure they have the right solutions in place to create a secure online presence, which allows them to identify non-human players or compromised devices or activity, securing a user’s digital identity and their online assets.
2.Positively identify
Once an organisation has identified that they have a secure session and are interacting with a human, they need to confirm that, the human is real and verified, not fake, and that they are allowed to do what they are asking to do. Technology such as behavioural biometrics, positively identifies genuine users rather than just identifying potential fraud, because a fraudster with the right username and password looks like a genuine user.
By drawing on thousands of data points unique to the individual, this more dynamic technique applies increased scrutiny to each user’s activity, allows for a smoother user experience, and builds up a digital identity of each person.
3.Multi-layered approach
To take this a step further, layering contextual data, including device, threat detection, and cryptography, along with behavioural biometrics to positively identify users, means there is less reliance on a small amount of evidence – or a single point of failure.
This mutli-layered approach of positive identification implements an innocent until proven guilty stance because it means genuine users can log-in until there’s a real reason for concern.
4.Security, not surveillance
Behavourial biometric technology doesn’t rely on cookies to identify people and organisations can obfuscate the data to protect user privacy at the same time. A layered approach to securing digital identities offers an effective solution without invading individual user privacy, and without increasing friction in the user experience. With 68 per cent of UK consumers supporting the creation of a digital identity system for a more secure online world, businesses must see the value in digital identity to ensure customers know their data is protected otherwise digital services will hold us back rather than help drive growth.
