Three Critical Features for Progressive Identity Verification

What does the phrase “progressive identity verification” mean, and why is it important?

In “progressive identity verification,” the identities of users who want to access a service are verified according to the level of trust associated with the service.

• Services with simple trust needs such as paying bills only require simple identity verification.
• Services with more extensive levels of trust such as driver’s license address changes require more robust identity verification.

If you perform stringent identity verification on everyone, regardless of need, this wastes organizational and user time. An unnecessarily onerous user onboarding process leads to customer friction and possible user abandonment of the onboarding process. For services with simple trust needs, it is best to onboard customers quickly without introducing unnecessary delays.

Do the existing progressive identity verification solutions satisfy the needs of the companies, government agencies, and other organizations that use them? A superior progressive identity verification solution incorporates the three critical features described below.

Multiple workflows

A superior progressive identity verification solution must support both simple and robust identity verification workflows.

Incode Omni supports these flows and can direct users to the appropriate one. For example:

• For a licensed driver who wants basic privileges to view their driver history or vehicle registration status at a state Department of Motor Vehicles website, a simple workflow could request basic proof that the driver is who they say they are, and then grant the privilege to view driver history.
• For a driver who wants more extensive privileges, such as the ability to change their address or request a replacement driver’s license, a robust workflow could request more stringent proofs of identity such as a verified change of address before providing the expanded privileges.
• If a driver already has the basic privileges and wants more extensive privileges, there is no need to repeat the entire stringent identity verification process. A special workflow can just request the proofs of identity that were not provided in the basic workflow.

Granularity

A superior progressive identity verification solution must support granular definition of identity verification, to support the specific needs of every organization.

The Incode Omni platform supports over 20 capture and identity verification modules alone, allowing a very granular definition of your workflow. You can choose among any of these options when designing each workflow for your organization:

• Capture facial images, identity documents, credit cards, PDF 417 barcodes, QR codes, and/or textual information such as addresses and proof of address statements.
• Confirm that the captured identity document is authentic.
• Confirm that the captured face is a live face (liveness detection).
• Compare the captured face against the face on a captured identity document.
• Compare the information on an identity document against the information stored in one or more government Systems of Record, such as a driver’s license database or a Social Security Number registry.

Effortless definition

A superior progressive identity verification solution must make it easy to define new workflows or modify existing ones.

Creating and modifying workflows on the Incode Omni platform is as effortless as checking or unchecking a few boxes. While Incode’s Solutions Engineers are always ready to assist customers, Incode Omni’s dashboard feature makes it easy for customers to define their own workflows.

In the example above:

• Someone in the organization has checked the box to indicate that they want to perform ID capture.
• Checking that box revealed additional options, and the customer has additionally checked the box for ID validation.
• The customer decided against performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the ID, or to verify the ID data against the Mexican INE government database.

If the customer subsequently decides that they do not need to check (or validate) IDs after all, the customer simply removes the check from the ID Capture row.

Part of the Total Solution

Finally, a superior progressive identify verification solution is only part of a superior total identity proofing solution.

In addition to Incode Omni’s powerful orchestration and its no-code capabilities, Incode Omni is a privacy-enabled platform offering full automation, processing at the edge, Incode-developed critical algorithms, flexible deployments, and secure partnerships. Allen Ganz discussed these capabilities in his recent blog post on user abandonment.

Do you need a superior progressive identity verification solution?

If you require a superior solution that allows organizations to define multiple workflows, provides granular definition of verification steps, and supports effortless creation and modification of workflows, then the Incode Omni platform meets and exceeds all your requirements.

Please contact us to learn more.