Inclusive, Secure, and Verified: The Future of Digital Identity Verification

 As we move more and more of our activity to the digital world (shopping, banking, gambling and dating), some sites now require a high degree of certainty about a user's eligibility to access the site's services

Digital applications often rely on an identity provider to provide identity claims to base entitlement decisions. These claims are sometimes self-certified, e.g., first name, last name. In many cases, back office staff must verify the physical identity associated with the digital account.

Ideally, we would like the digital account enrolment to verify both the digital world (email address) and the physical identity associated with the digital account. After all, you can only be accountable for a digital account if it's bound to a real person.

With today's technology, various techniques are possible.

• Biometric liveness detection
• Document chip reading, e.g. Passport
• Document validation of security features
• Optical character recognition of document data fields
• Open Banking checks
   

The physical identity claims (First name, last name, DOB ) will then be associated with a verified digital identity, allowing the application to make more informed access decisions.

Digital inclusion is also a key requirement. Not everyone has a Passport or a Driving License, so any mechanism you deploy should be as inclusive and accessible as possible. Handling this in-house starts to become difficult, so partnering with a platform that can support a variety of models is essential for digital inclusion.

Rock Solid Knowledge has integrated physical identity verification platforms into its Single Sign-On solution, enabling its customers to be sure of the confirmed identity behind a digital account. For UK-based identity verification, we have partnered with Select ID. This platform offers us access to a range of UK government-certified identity providers, and we are in early discussions with a possible partner that can provide European-wide verification.