More than 30 years ago, a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker, now made famous by any number of memes and framed pictures -- a canine perched at a computer, proclaiming: "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
Fast forward to the current Millennium, a quarter of a century old, and the sentiment holds true -- verifying that the person on the other side of a screen, a device, a text message is who they say they are, is no small matter.
"We're living our lives, irrevocably, online," Catherine Porter, chief business officer at Prove Identity, told PYMNTS.
And identity -- more specifically, verification of that identity -- is a challenge that's been compounded with artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies in the mix.
Fraud is becoming more advanced online," she said, and we're living in an age where the tools fraudsters can use to buy identities online and use them as their own identities to commit crimes are advancing rapidly.
"The 'age of AI,'" she said, where AI helps in defrauding identities by replicating them, "is creating the necessity that consumers and the sites that build platforms for consumers have a layer of trust built into them."
Prove has been building that layer of trust over the course of more than a decade -- across banking, healthcare and other industries, using phone centric verification that helps remove friction across interactions while bolstering security at the same time with its identity verification platform and network. The company has just announced the rollout of its Verified Users offering, which verifies and "persists" a digital checkmark that accompanies users across their various online journeys.
That verification is especially critical because, as Porter noted, "we're making our local communities smaller as we interact with people that we're meeting online first." The platforms where we meet online are not just domestic, they're global in scope. We meet online first, and then in a restaurant on a date. We hire plumbers sight unseen before they come into our house, and babysitters are no longer just referred by the neighbors.
A hallmark of the online realm, of course, is the pseudonym, used to erect a wall of privacy for our identities as we take to online platforms that allow us to have a presence sans our real names.
"But this does create some risk for the inevitable human to human connections," Porter said. The Verified Users setting, she said, can cut across the various names enlisted by an individual, and Prove continuously verifies that individual as they live their online lives after a one-time, initial authentication.
In terms of the mechanics of the new verification process, Porter said users sign up for an account, and as part of the platform, the firm verifies one's identity against their mobile phone number. With 9 of the top 10 banks using Prove's account opening technology for more than a decade, she said, "we've verified 90% of adults in the U.S. with 100% accuracy." The company, she added, does not hold consumers' private information (PII). The associated identity held in a client firm's database is verified and encrypted, and can be used to ward off potential fraudsters or even bots that are swarming across platforms. For regulators, the verification can be valuable in establishing whether someone online posing as an adult is actually a minor.
"It all goes back to the telephony signals and the authoritative data that we use to say, 'are you a verified human? Are you an adult?'" Adults, after all, have likely held the same phone number for decades, which in turn implies that there exist plenty of "signals" to ascertain their identities.
Looking ahead, Porter said that Prove will continue to expand into its key verticals, and over the longer term, with Verified Users, rewarding "good users" across a platform as they conduct commerce.
As she told PYMNTS, "we'll take the identification verification that we've used successfully in the banking environment, and port it to the digital marketplaces to help keep those consumers safe."
