Identity verification, as defined by Gartner, is a set of activities conducted during remote interactions to bring a real-world identity claim within an organization’s risk tolerances. It ensures that a person’s identity exists, that the individual claiming it is the true owner, and that they are genuinely present during the remote interaction. Identity verification is used for various business purposes, including:

1. Compliance: Meeting regulatory requirements such as know-your-customer (KYC) obligations.
2. Onboarding: Enabling processes like customer registration, remote workforce hiring, and employee onboarding.
3. Account Security: Supporting credential management processes, including enrollment and account recovery.
4. Mitigating Fraud Risk: Preventing fraudulent activities such as registrations with stolen or synthetic identities, enabling remote proctoring, and securing high-risk transactions.
5. Trust and Safety: Enhancing accountability in marketplaces, providing assurance in the gig economy, and establishing trust in larger identity networks.

Key capabilities in the identity verification market include:

1. Capture of Photo and Data: Capturing a person’s photo and data from a photo identification document and assessing the document’s authenticity. This can be done through optical capture and processing (including OCR, bar codes, or QR codes) or data extraction from a chip using NFC.
2. Face Image Capture: Capturing the person’s face with integrated presentation attack detection to ensure human presence, followed by biometric facial comparison with the photo from the identity document.
3. Configurable Policies: Allowing the customization of policies for handling personally identifiable information, including retention periods and data residency.

Standard capabilities include:

1. Administrative Portal: Providing an administrative portal with reporting, analytics, and separation of duties frameworks.

Optional capabilities include:

1. Connectivity with External Data Sources: Integrating with external data sources to corroborate information obtained during the identity verification process, such as government document-issuing authorities, government biometric databases, vendor-managed identity graphs, and credit bureaus.
2. Support for Video Calls: Enabling video calls during the identity verification process, allowing agents to interact with individuals to assess their identity claims, as required by regulations in certain markets. The vendor may provide agents or platform features for organizations to use their own agents.
3. Fraud Detection: Assessing signals such as location intelligence or device attributes used in the identity verification process to detect potential fraud.
4. Authentication and Duplication Checking: Supporting authentication and duplication checking using identity and biometric data, including one-to-one biometric comparisons and one-to-many searches of biometric data and identity attributes.
5. Identity Wallet: Offering an identity wallet that enables individuals to store verified identity attributes and control how they are presented to relying parties. This identity wallet may be vendor-branded or available for white labeling.