By Alan Hatfield
With the rise in digital transactions across all verticals – from retail to banking to cryptocurrency – identity verification technology is more important than ever before.
ExecEdge sat down with Rodger Desai, CEO & Co-Founder of Prove to discuss the company’s unique, phone-centric approach to proving identity and how they’re helping brands to improve security and reduce fraud – while enhancing customer experience.
Tell us a little bit about Prove – how the company was founded, its mission, and what the company does?
Prove’s solutions enable businesses and organizations to remove the friction and fraud risk associated with mobile, desktop, tablet, call center, and even in-person transactions, while enhancing consumer privacy and choice.
Prove’s guiding mission is centered around creating an equitable and convenient solution to digital transactions and identity verification processes, designed to open up access to online services around the world and mitigate fraud. With only 19.2% of the world population holding credit cards (World Bank), Prove was founded on the basis of creating an innovative way to democratize how we engage in digital payments, and this mission has since expanded to the broader challenge of digital identity verification across multiple industries, channels, and use cases. Given that 78% of the world population currently possesses a mobile device or smartphone (Statista), Prove’s technology was built with the outlook that mobile-centric identity verification is the path forward to making digital experiences more seamless and secure across the globe.
The identity verification market seems relatively new. What is the market like, and how has it evolved?
As we evolve further to rely on mobile technology to power our transactions and daily interactions, digital identity verification is becoming a powerful and necessary tool. With e-commerce activity steadily increasing, the global payments market size is expected to grow to $89.1B in 2021 to $180.4B by 2026. Organizations and businesses are faced with the challenge of ensuring that their customers’ data and transactions are fully secure from identity fraud and theft.
As such, the market for digital identity solutions is rapidly increasing in size, with an annual projected growth rate of 16.1% from 2021 to 2027. This recent and sharp growth can be attributed to both the evolution of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the continued rise in cyber threats and fraud activity that endangers consumers. As new Covid-19 variants arise and the pandemic continues to mature in unpredictable ways, more and more organizations are permanently shifting into remote operations, accelerating the digitization of transactions and interactions within businesses and with their customers. Consequently, this rapid digitization opens the door for hackers to infiltrate confidential transactional data and personal information, with new and widespread cyber hacks and orchestrated attacks developing every day. In turn, this creates an emergent need across organizations to lock down personal information and verify users’ identities in the most secure way possible.
There has been a growing conversation on identity fraud – especially in the mobile-first world we live in today. What unique value does Prove deliver to the market?
With mobile and smartphones becoming extremely accessible and ubiquitous, Prove offers the most secure and efficient way for organizations to verify their customers’ identity, utilizing unique signals from their cell phones in order to reduce fraud and protect consumer privacy.
Prove’s technology is designed to create a comprehensive ecosystem of digital trust between consumers and organizations. This protects consumers from fraud and allows companies to quickly verify users. Prove’s technology operates using a Phone Identity Network (PIN), which creates and maintains unique consumer identity tokens that enable Prove’s network to measure risk and mitigate cyber threat. These privacy enhancing tokens are secured through the consumer’s unique SIM card, allowing the user complete control over when and how their identity and information is being shared. Leveraging SIM verification, Prove’s technology is able to identify phone-centric identity signals and safely verify that the user of any detected device is currently in possession of the device as well as the verified owner. Utilizing this thorough network of identifying tokens and identifiers, Prove continues to offer the most secure and comprehensive identity verification software in the market.
How do you envision identity verification evolving within the next two to three years, and what’s next for Prove?
The identity verification market has grown tremendously, and is forecasted to nearly double from $7.6B in 2020 to $15.8B by 2025. In 2022 and beyond, identity verification technology will evolve to encompass more advanced and wide spread applications, designed to make the verification process more efficient and robust. The rise of facial recognition and biometrics technologies, especially, will play a vital role in emerging methods. As mobile device technology improves at a rapid rate, banks, financial institutions and organizations will be able to increasingly apply biometrics solutions to secure their transactions and accounts with the highest level of ease and confidence. Developing biometrics technology will grow ten-fold over the next 2-3 years to become more accurate and frictionless, lending itself to infinite applications across organizations to protect data and securely authorize access.
As mobile device and biometric technologies continue to mature, Prove’s identity verification technology will continue to evolve alongside them in lockstep to stay one step ahead of growing fraud threats. With identity verification becoming a principal concern for organizations to fight against cyber threats, Prove is constantly expanding and progressing to combat identity fraud and increasingly intelligent hackers.
