Transacting with Trust During COVID-19 & Beyond: Online/Mobile Identity Verification

We are in the midst of a global crisis. Many businesses around the world are closing their offices and instructing employees to work from home in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. Additionally, numerous retailers have begun to close their storefronts, as many people are self-quarantining for the next several weeks. And when people do venture out, health officials are recommending social distancing, which includes keeping a 6-foot buffer zone – making it difficult to perform in-person transactions.

In response, there has been a surge in online transactions as in-person transactions now have the danger of spreading the virus through an exchange of physical IDs and cards. There has also  been an increase in electronic payments as cash is considered a way to spread the virus. On the healthcare front, when U.S. lawmakers waived telehealth restrictions for Medicare, the flood doors opened for remote consultations. Now many doctors and medical facilities are using telemedicine to manage the high volume of patients.

Now that so many daily activities and transactions are being performed online, the need for identity verification is greater than ever to enable all of us to transact with trust. For retailers there’s likely an increase in payment fraud. In telemedicine and mobile medical practice management, there are HIPAA requirements to comply with and insurance coverage payouts to consider. Financial services companies will experience an increase in online banking and a need to comply with KYC/AML.

In every case, businesses should be asking consumers to submit identity verification. No matter your industry or use case, Acuant’s Trusted Identity Platform instantly prevents and reduces fraud making it easy to address risk, comply with regulations and provide an exceptional customer experience. We enable multi-factor Identity Verification in seconds, via any channel, on any device, from any location.

Acuant WebID™ allows users to seamlessly verify their identity across channels utilizing both Acuant AssureID™ and Acuant FaceID via HTML and their mobile device. Businesses can onboard consumers and verify identities any way they choose – including via the web, on a smartphone or within an app. For consumers, there is nothing to download, no app to install and an easy-to-follow mobile browser experience.  Businesses can easily integrate this within their system to be up and running quickly rather than spend time and budget on building out the front end.

Acuant FaceID offers biometric facial recognition match via a selfie and a liveness test. The customer snaps a picture of their government issued ID and then takes a selfie and a liveness test. The selfie image is compared to the identity document (which is authenticated) to verify a match and provide a confidence score in seconds. Acuant now offers NIST tested and iBeta certified Advanced Passive Liveness to further thwart the increasingly sophisticated fraud of deepfakes and video replay. All workflows protect personally identifiable information (PII) providing encryption to and from the cloud with no images or data being stored.

As organizations scramble to adapt to a rapidly changing way of life, it is important to maintain trust as the foundation of our economic and healthcare infrastructure. While many of us are trying to act responsibly in this challenging time, there will be those that seek to exploit this opportunity for their own gain. Identity verification solutions can give businesses a superior way to stop fraud, meet compliance standards, support government health directives and ultimately transact with trust online.

This current crisis begs the question of how far away we are from implementing digital IDs globally. It is evident that all should follow the lead of the EU and other countries when it comes to eIDs and digital identity. As we move towards a new normal, it will be critical for all to do trusted business digitally beyond COVID-19.

Make sure to sign-up for our next Acuant news update to hear about our latest development in digital identity management.