It was about ten in the evening when I arrived at the Frédéric Chopin airport in Warsaw. I was tired, and next day our team had an important presentation at the Frontex Industry day. I needed a taxi ASAP. The queue with the city taxis was terribly long, but fortunately there was a nice line of Bolt cars waiting. I like Bolt. The app is enjoyable to use, payment is easy, they're a European enterprise, and in many cities there's a reliable supply of their vehicles.
Booting up the Bolt app, I was able to quickly select the destination and a cab. I was greeted with a pop up - "We need to verify your identity". Great that Bolt takes the safety of their passengers and drivers seriously. I took pictures of my Dutch ID card and submitted them for analysis.
However, I was greeted with a surprising response. "This can take 2 to 3 minutes". And it did. I kept refreshing the app, nothing happened. Bolt cab after cab were taken by other travellers, passing me in the queue. Those few minutes felt like an age. After a few minutes the long line of Bolt cars was gone.
So was my patience.
In the end, the app verified my identity (or at least suggested it did). And ten minutes later a new Bolt car came to my rescue. But Bolt had already lost a few stars in my review and my admiration.
We see this a lot: identity verification is used in more and more processes to reduce fraud or increase safety. Like with Bolt, many companies use optical verification because they think it is user friendly and creates conversion. It does not. Optical verification can easily be manipulated, and fraudsters can and will get through. It does not create conversion, it creates frustration. It made me (almost) switch to Uber.
Using the chip in your identity document and the NFC capabilities of your smartphone creates instant identity verification where the authenticity of the document can be verified within seconds. Any fraudulent document is detected, whether manipulated or cloned.
When done properly, NFC identity verification is the best user experience possible. Combining it with optical verification as a fall-back for documents without a chip you get the best of both worlds - no need to sacrifice security for high conversion.
Adding customer frustration to low reliability identity verification does not lead to efficiency - it is an enormous step backwards. Two minutes can be way too long in many situations, and especially where competition is literally around the corner.
Use NFC to create a truly seamless customer experience without fraud. Try it yourself with your own document using our ReadID Me personal app. And tell me what you think of it.