Today, the 26th of July, Gartner published its revised Hype Cycle for Digital Identity 2023. Identity verification, previously called ‘Document Centric Identity Verification’ by Gartner, moved further up the Plateau of Productivity, with High Benefits and less than two years to Mainstream Adoption. In an age of persistent data leaks and the rapid emergence of generative AI into the mainstream, it’s about time businesses begin to upgrade their approach to verifying user identities.
Gartner renamed Document Centric Identity Verification to simply “Identity Verification”, stressing the fact that data-centric identity verification should not be used. This outdated method, according to Gartner, involved comparing Personal Identifiable Information (PII) against third-party graphs of PII obtained from reputable sources to confirm a user’s identity. Not only is this method incredibly insecure and easy to spoof, but as Gartner puts it, “In the face of continual breaches of data, it is prudent to assume all PII data is known to everyone.”
Concerns with optical verification
In the hype cycle, Gartner mentions the use of NFC and also their concerns with respect to optical verification. “Concerns persist regarding how effectively document authenticity can be assessed via remote visual inspection, and whether deepfake attacks could fool the liveness detection”, according to Gartner. We strongly agree with this view and therefore advocate an “NFC-first” approach to identity verification, using the fact that chipped identity documents cannot be tampered with without detection by ReadID, as well as that it does not require additional data intensive validity checks that might raise privacy concerns, such as an individual providing documents such as electricity bills or pay checks.
“Concerns persist regarding how effectively document authenticity can be assessed via remote visual inspection” – Gartner, July 2023
Gartner also raises concerns with respect to UX, with questions about drop-out rates. We see a lot of confusion in the market in this field. Creating high conversion in real-time is hard. ReadID customers report up to 96% conversion, backed by data from our internal tool ReadID Analytics. This analysis platform collects anonymous data about ReadID transactions.
Identity wallets moving up
It is also interesting to see that Identity Wallets are moving through the hype cycle at a very high pace, despite the confusion around the term “identity wallets”, including proprietary solutions as well as upcoming open standards based wallets. Identity verification with NFC can be an important component for verified data ingestion into wallets due to its aforementioned ability to detect fraudulent documents thanks to security features inherent in chipped identity documents
Gartner also links identity verification to the use of Third Party Biometrics, with organisations adopting the “ID + selfie” approach for onboarding. With ReadID, biometric verification can use the high-resolution face image from the chip to match with the user’s selfie, increasing the quality and reliability of this step, leading to interesting applications in many industries. Eurostar launched its SmartCheck solution during the same week of Gartner’s Hype Cycle publication, indicating big changes to the way we picture identity verification
If you want to know more on how to do Identity Verification in a secure and user friendly way, feel free to book a demo with our team or to try out our personal app ReadID Me.
