Mitek's Chris Briggs recently sat down for an interview at the Future Identity Festival in London.
At the event deemed “Europe’s most dynamic and future focused identity festival”, Chris discusses how Mitek can help customers build secure, robust, and frictionless consumer journeys, whilst bridging the gap between physical and digital identity. Check out his thought-provoking responses in the Q&A below or watch the full video interview here:
Q. How is Mitek building trust through identity verification?
C. Briggs: Mitek bridges the divide between physical identity and digital identity. An as we work with our customers on ensuring that those digital identities properly reflect who somebody is, and various transactions, whether it’s to meet compliance or fraud to determine someone is who they say they are or ultimately just to better fit the overall customer experience and ensuring that the consumer in a transaction is actually going through the easiest and most seamless process possible. Layered on top of that is this whole idea of trust, the idea that we can go to a verifiable source, or we can prove that that person is who they say they are as part of that transaction. Which increasing the trust level for both our customers, as well as for the consumers themselves.
For more on the future of identity, check out Chris Briggs’ recent article in Forbes
Q. How can digital identity enable businesses to provide secure and well-executed customer journeys?
C. Briggs: So, onboarding and ongoing authorizations or authentication transactions are an important part of what our customer looks for as they create both trust and verifying the identity in a specific transaction. I know that sounds a little bit circular but let me give you an example: When we work without customers, whether its FS or gambling or more broadly some of the players in the space, we get a good understanding of what they are looking for to ensure the customer is who they say they are. It is a very practical approach, it is an understanding of how they are going to manage that interaction with the consumer, but also how they want the consumer to interact with them at the end of the day. A financial services transaction may look slightly different from a gambling transaction, there is a different level of risk, there is a different level of accommodation for the consumers and understanding of who they are and what they are doing. When we look at that, we will look at a lot of different types of data and attributes associated to that, to get a better understanding of the identity being real or not real, and then we help our customers measure that risk against the realness or what people would call in the industry ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’ to get a better idea of whether the customer is who they say they are in that transaction. SO, really a very pragmatic and practical way of interacting with our customer and the consumers to have that as part of the process.
Q. Which trend or innovation will drive tangible progress in the next few years?
C. Briggs: So the trends that are going to affect where the industry is going, are really two or three-fold. The first is there is a network effect, you must have people that can issue a digital identity or an identity in general and then people that can accept that identity in a common framework or common network. Now, many have tried to create this common network over time, but so far, we have not seen wide adoption of the core capability across types of industries or players or event within the consumers themselves. So, these micro networks have emerged over time, which allow consumers to talk to other consumers within specific spaces. Once that gets bigger and you see wider consumer acceptance, you will see that grow. Now this will likely need to be enhanced, with some government regulations, like the ones issued around the EUDI, to enhance the issuance and acceptance of digital identity and identity objects more general in the space. The consumers, quite frankly need to get used to using it. You see the adoption of device-based identity, but prior to that you see the adoption of device-based payments, which, has become quite popular, whether you are using Google Pay or Apple Pay as part of the overall network. The fact of the matter is, consumers must get used to using it in every single transaction. We are only starting to see the beginnings of that. The last thing I would say is the regulatory framework changes, that are really becoming increasingly important. Many of our customers are trying to keep up with the level of change in the markets, overall whether its state by state in the US, or provincial or across the EU and it’s quite often difficult for them to understand the implications of those regulations in how they run their business. So, these different areas provide a lot of benefit, but they can also hinder the border use of identities, digital identities specifically, over time. It’s something the market is going to have to work through to be able to get to that point.
Learn how multimodal authentication plays into the future of identity