Almost every industry in every business vertical has been affected by the pandemic.
While some industries like restaurants and brick-and-mortar retail have slowed or even stalled, other areas like eCommerce have thrived. In looking at the verticals that have flourished, the common thread has been the digital-first mentality. And with that mentality come new regulations and new urgency to ensuring that the digital-first customer is who they say they are.
That intersection has been a focus for Acuant, a leading global identity verification provider. Kevin Courtney, vice president of Product, told PYMNTS that his firm, which serves all major verticals, has seen the most outsized negative impacts on industries where crowds gather for leisure and commerce.
In just one example: “We serve more than 65 percent of new car dealerships in the United States where we extract data from identity cards and verify the ID for a more seamless buying process, but it just fell off the cliff. Hospitality was just decimated,” Courtney said, notably within the hotel space, but negative ripple effects have also been seen with rental car agencies and airlines. Pandemic-related cleaning and social distancing standards have helped a bit, but it’s a long way to get back to where things once were.
The pandemic has also been a catalyst for financial services firms. Facing branch closures and continued challenges from digital-only banks, traditional financial institutions (FIs) have had to adopt new onboarding ID verification technologies to broaden their offerings across mobile devices.
“Challenger banks don’t have that set infrastructure, so it’s much easier for them to adapt to the new technology,” explained Courtney. “FIs have the challenge of authenticating users across several channels, where [know your customer (KYC)] and [anti-money laundering (AML)] mandates must be satisfied while providing a good user experience.”
Healthcare stands out, particularly with telehealth. The move to digital appointments was fast adopted and widely adopted for leading healthcare institutions and smaller practices alike. This may change the way people receive outpatient care forever and has opened up better options for dealing with patients based in remote areas.
While travel has faced its own unique issues, Courtney said he believes vaccination passports will take off quickly, but there will likely be debates over who has authority over the data and the confirmation of that information. As the regulatory issues are hammered out, he said he believes immunity passports will see adoption in the short term.
“Everyone loves convenience,” he said, adding that “if you have a vaccination passport, you can essentially walk to the front of the line.”
Biometrics And Beyond
Generally speaking, biometrics remains the fastest-moving technology segment, said Courtney. He noted that the inputs needed to prove someone’s identity have moved from methods that were once very spoofable to more advanced algorithms and liveness tests that can catch and prevent fraud. This involves the use of technology that can even catch video replay, deepfakes and masks.
“Not only do we want to authenticate that someone has an identity that’s tied to a government-issued document, but also that they are actually there and present at the time of the transaction,” he said.
As vaccines are rolled out and people start to gather in public places again, ID verification may find its way into new avenues, such as hotels, predicted Courtney. Traditionally, hotels might scan IDs because they’d need to extract data.
“But they might not really look to validate you as being who you claim to be,” he noted.
New standards are on the horizon that would certify whether hotels are safe in terms of public health — and the only way to do that is to know who is staying there and whether they have been vaccinated or are immune to the coronavirus. For the assurances of public safety and convenience when conducting daily life, said Courtney, people will be willing to give up at least some personally identifiable information (PII).
Beyond public health concerns, digital ID verification will also increasingly be used in the fight against fraud. Here in the U.S., Courtney said he believes we’ll also see more ID scrutiny at the state and municipal level, especially when it comes to tracking whether stimulus payments are winding up at their intended destinations.
In other words: “Who is getting these checks, and how are you vetting them, and how are you proving who they are?” Courtney asked. And as the vaccines become more widely available, “how do you prove you are 65? It’s at the local level that governments need to vet people.”
So how do businesses in all industries keep up with the digital change and identity challenges? Courtney said one way to get there fast is to look for deployment methods that are agile like no code/low code.
Many firms simply don’t have the manpower or the technical resources to conduct robust and compliant verification activities on their own. He noted that companies such as Acuant — with open-source standards and RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs) — offer companies the ability to get identity verification efforts up and running within hours. That’s particularly of value for companies that want to speed up go-to-market and digital transformation.
“You don’t have to compromise on your identity platform if you don’t have a massive IT department and a big budget,” said Courtney.
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