The team at UnifyID has announced that they’re teaming up with Prove.
The UnifyID team notes that ever since they began offering services, they knew or realized that they were only addressing a relatively small piece of the identity problem. They also mentioned that they knew that there are “strong network effects” in identity and so those entities that operate on a larger scale may have an unfair advantage against smaller market participants.
According to UnifyID, they have developed a behavioral biometrics solution that’s accurate or reliable enough to authenticate the individual behind the device without needing any active participation from the users.
UnifyID claims that they have some great clients but their commercial impact had been limited because they were only addressing part of the problem.
Clients had to bring together their own ID solution from various service providers, and the UnifyID team missed out on some customer opportunities because some firms would not rely on a startup for requirements as critical as their identity stack. UnifyID’s management further noted that they did not have the resources to make the impact they intended to make.
They chose Prove from a huge identity market, based on several reasons or criteria.
According to UnifyID, ID solutions need to effectively perform identity verification (IDV), by proving that a user is actually tied to a real-world identity. This step is usually carried out when people set up their account.
Then there’s authentication, which involves making sure you’re the same individual you were the last time you logged into a platform. This process is typically carried out every time users log into a service.
UnifyID explains that they’ve been quite focused on making the second part (authentication) as seamless as they can because authentication can be a source of user friction that takes place all the time.
However, identity verification is a key part of identity, particularly during user onboarding. And the current state of identity verification is terrible, according to UnifyID.
Many solution providers tend to ask questions that are based on public records or a client’s credit report. They may also ask users to take a photo of their driver’s license, or enter a credit card number.
Knowledge-based factors are worthless for ID verification since they’re difficult to keep secret or hide in a digital environment where data breaches have become quite common. They’re also annoying for most users.
According to UnifyID, Prove has the “best, most seamless solution” available in the market for performing ID verification. It lets people use their mobile phone number to verify their identity in a seamless manner.
Prove has entered agreements with various mobile carriers in order to get access to key information about users’ mobile numbers, so they can determine if a person is the actual owner of a particular number, and whether a request is actually coming from their mobile phone.
Since this usually takes place without the user having to do anything, it lets Prove provide solutions such as Prove Pre-fill, which may significantly lower friction during customer onboarding while making the process more secure.
Prove is being used by many financial institutions globally, including major U.S. banks, the announcement noted.