Balance High Identity Assurance and Swift Onboarding

Organizations face the constant challenge of achieving identity assurance to establish trust and mitigate fraud while also streamlining customer onboarding and avoiding operational bottlenecks.

It’s a delicate balance, but it’s attainable by mixing and matching identity verification capabilities. A flexible verification strategy that adjusts to different markets can help organizations elevate their match rates while achieving the identity assurance level they need.

Identity assurance processes can involve various techniques and technologies to verify people and business entities. Those measures help prevent unauthorized access, fraud and identity theft.

Determine the Appropriate Identity Assurance Level

Identity assurance levels correlate to different tiers of verification confidence for a person or business entity. The levels are often used to categorize the reliability of identity verification processes. The higher the assurance level, the more stringent and reliable the authentication method is.

Different countries have different standards for identity assurance levels. For example, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology provides Digital Identity Guidelines for federal government agencies’ risk assessments and digital services implementation. In the EU, eIDAS lays out requirements to help ensure safe access to government services. The EU also has a provisional agreement on a new framework for European digital identity.

Typically, identity assurance levels are categorized into low, moderate and high. Here’s a general overview.

Low Assurance Level

Basic identity verification with minimal requirements
Typically involves simple information checks, such as for usernames and passwords

Moderate Assurance Level

Requires additional evidence and more robust authentication methods
Can involve multifactor authentication or biometric verification
Provides moderate confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the identity verification

High Assurance Level

Requires extensive evidence and may include in-person verification or specialized authentication tokens
Offers high confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the identity verification

Assurance levels help organizations tailor their identity verification processes based on the sensitivity of their data or services. For example, organizations often seek high assurance levels for sensitive financial transactions, government services or health care records to ensure robust, secure identity verification.

Mix and Match Verification Processes

Organizations can refine identity assurance tactics to match use cases and risk levels.

A risk-based approach to onboarding continually adapts risk controls to match individual circumstances. It’s a strategy based on flexibility that helps organizations optimize performance for regulatory compliance, market realities, security, growth and onboarding speed.

It makes sense, for instance, to prioritize identity document verification for countries that lack data sources, for people with thin credit files and for high assurance to mitigate fraud. In other situations, verifying identity data is more appropriate because it provides enough assurance without slowing customer onboarding.

Risk profiles, regulations and onboarding strategies change constantly. The ability to quickly adapt to change helps organizations ensure they can always achieve the right identity assurance level.

When organizations combine that flexibility with intelligent routing to the ideal verification capability for each onboarding instance, they position themselves to achieve higher verification rates, reduce fraud and ensure compliance anywhere in the world.