Identity Acceptance: Verify Users Without Starting Over

Chapters

• 1:32 — Introduction to Identity Acceptance

• 4:58 — Reusable identity as a way to reduce friction

• 9:27 — Aggregating digital ID sources to build an acceptance network

• 10:35 — How identity acceptance works

• 13:20 — Live demo of identity acceptance

• 16:29 — Implications for businesses who need to verify users

• 22:24 — Implications for identity companies

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Hello everybody. Thanks a lot for joining. Excited to talk about identity acceptance on today's webinar. It's been a little while since Trinsic has done a webinar, so this is fun. Okay, I'm going to hit share to hopefully share my slide deck. Good. Well, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Riley Hughes. I'm one of the co-founders of Trinsic, and we've been doing Trinsic for five years now on a journey to try to make the world more accessible through better digital identity. And we've been on a, again, on a journey through various iterations of that. And I'm really excited to talk today about identity acceptance, which is something that I think is a big unlock in making that vision a reality. My elevator pitch, if you take nothing else away from the webinar and you wonder what Trinsic does and what identity acceptance means, well, what Trinsic does is we help you verify your users 10 times faster by accepting digital IDs they already have. So I'm going to walk through what exactly that means, how exactly we do that, in these six steps.

Riley Hughes: So we'll start off with an introduction to the concept of identity acceptance. Okay. I am ashamed to say, I'm sure most of you will get this right, which image was generated with AI, but at first when I looked at this, I almost got it wrong. I was second guessing myself, and now that I say that, I bet many of you are as well. The correct, the one on the left here is the one generated by AI. But the point is that it's becoming harder and harder to tell what is authentic online. It's becoming harder and harder to distinguish between synthetic identities that are perhaps deepfakes, perhaps have synthetic reputations created on different platforms or social media or bureau data and social security numbers, things like that, right, versus true people. And this is the reason why, over the last year, more and more massive digital platforms have been either requiring users to verify themselves or inviting users to verify themselves for extra benefits or features. Uber right now is piloting verifying all riders, whereas previously they did all the drivers.

Riley Hughes: Airbnb used to only verify the hosts; now they're verifying all the guests. Many of you may have been verified on LinkedIn, which is now adding a shield icon next to the names that are verified. And, you know, there's a couple of points here. One is like, huh, I wonder why they're just all now doing this now. Why didn't they do this before if it's something that's valuable to them? But I think the reason is pretty obvious. It's because, you know, verifying yourself on one of these platforms is a laborious task, right? And these are competitive markets. If Uber asked every rider to verify their identity, well, some riders might just opt to go use Lyft or a taxi or something, right? And so in a world where growth is prioritized, you know, this is not something that maybe was done, and companies would eat the costs of fraud and other related costs. But in a world where, you know, companies need to have trust in their users and scale their platforms efficiently, many companies are rolling out this kind of verification process where a user takes a photo of an ID document and a selfie.

Riley Hughes: The selfie, you know, and the liveness check is matched up against the image in the document. You can see this is an old passport of mine, where you can see high school-aged Riley there. But, you know, and then the verification is sort of done using AI and machine learning and third-party data sources to corroborate the data that's presented. And there are dozens of companies that do this, and they are, you know, they try to do it very well. But the big challenge is that this is a pain, right? When I went through this process, as you can see, I took a screenshot. Despite my passport being fully visible, it says bottom two lines are not visible, even though they are. You know, I'm asked to move my head around in different ways. You know, some platforms make me hold my document next to my face and then remove it, remove it, and all sorts of things. So it's just a pain for users. And this is why the majority of identity verification companies are now starting to implement something called reusable identity.

Riley Hughes: And reusable ID is the process of taking the result of the verification, the outcome from a verification, and allowing a user to save it to a profile, right? And this can be done in multiple ways. You have companies like Clear and ID.me and others that give a user a username and password to authenticate back in and obtain access to their reusable identity. Other companies like Airside and Yoti require users to download a mobile app and store their identity information on their device. This is also the way a lot of self-sovereign identity and decentralized identity platforms work, is that there's a mobile app download. But regardless of how the reusable identity is stored from a product perspective, in principle, these products all do the same thing, which is they allow a user to store a copy of their identity verification results so that next time they go somewhere, they can present those results and get through faster.

Riley Hughes: And as you can see in this example of screens, you know, a reusable identity can be presented in 10 seconds, as opposed to a document scan, which can take, you know, 100 seconds or something. Which. dramatically improves the user experience, or in other words, reduces friction, or in other words, gets more good users in the door. But there's a challenge here too, because despite reusable identity being a popular thing with millions and millions of people having reusable identities, in fact hundreds of millions of people having reusable IDs, and, you know, if you count government-issued things like, you know, Aadhaar and other ones, you know, then there's billions of people with a reusable ID. Despite that, the market is extremely fragmented, right? You have all kinds of government schemes, including in the United States with mobile driver's licenses, in Europe with eIDAS 2.0, Australia, you know, and other countries have, you know, government-issued digital IDs, which are all different and fragmented.

Riley Hughes: And then on the other hand, you have private companies launching reusable ID systems as well, all of which are different. And although there are some standards that could be used there to make things a little easier, so far those standards have not been widely adopted, or ones that have been adopted haven't shown the true sort of interoperability that maybe they were originally started to, or intended to deliver. And so what we end up with is a very fragmented landscape of digital ID with dozens and dozens and dozens of reusable identity networks or ecosystems. So you might say, You know, if you're somebody like Trinsic, you might be like, oh, let's—well, this is very fragmented. It's, you know, nothing's working. Let's create the real reusable identity system to rule them all. And, you know, if you've seen this cartoon, which is sort of a joke in standards communities, right, where in a situation where there are, you know, a bunch of competing standards, people often will say, oh, let's create one universal standard that covers all the use cases.

Riley Hughes: And then, you know, there ends up with 15 competing standards. And, you know, it's funny that this is such a meme, but also is so true for those of us who have worked in the standards space. You actually see this actually almost exact conversation and exact outcome happening repeatedly. And the same thing happens in reusable identity, right? And so far, we are tracking 128 different reusable identity ecosystems, and that is the literal number from our database that we keep internally. And, you know, it seems like every day we see someone else having a similar conversation and coming out with another reusable identity network. So the way to think about this is if you're a business, you need to verify your users. These users, you know, hundreds of millions of them, already have a digital identity that is trustworthy, right? So how do you manage that? Well, it's really hard. You can't just pick one network or one company that, you know, gives you access to all of those, right? Because it's so fragmented.

Riley Hughes: The solution is to aggregate a bunch of sources to allow users to bring their digital identity regardless of where it comes from, right? Users have it somewhere. You don't know where they have it, and so you probably have to integrate a bunch of different places. Now, that is a laborious process. That's, you know, challenging and costly to do, to create legal agreements and technical integrations with all these different sources. And so this is where—this is what Trinsic does. This is what we call identity acceptance, and this is our business. It is in, again— Helping you verify users much faster by accepting digital IDs they already have, regardless of where those IDs come from. And so far, we have dozens of partners. This graphic shows 15 partners, but this is by no means an exhaustive list, where, you know, collectively throughout all these partners, there are over 60 million users who can instantly verify their identity through Trinsic using a reusable identity.

Riley Hughes: Okay, that is what identity acceptance is, and maybe why it matters and sort of the landscape that we're operating under. Now let's talk about how it works, because there's a lot of questions, you know, that people tend to ask, you know, when I share that slide. So if you're a business that needs to verify your users, here's how you should think about it, or here's how identity acceptance would work for you. You would configure, first of all, what you need out of the verification. For example, if you need my legal name, you could specify that. If you need my age, you could specify that. If you need my date of birth, you could specify that, right? So you specify what things you need. Second, you specify your trust requirements, because every, of course, every, you know, verification is different. Every time a reusable identity is created, it's done a little differently than another one. A reusable identity created for travel, for example, is going to be different than one created for financial services.

Riley Hughes: And the ability to express one's risk appetite and trust requirements is an important piece of any identity acceptance network. You'll also want to express your compliance requirements because, again, different reusable IDs comply with different regulations, and as well as which geographies your users are active in, which is of course necessary to find the relevant digital IDs or reusable identities for you. And then as Trinsic, if you were using Trinsic for your identity acceptance solution, you know, we would take all these inputs, we, you know, map those requirements to our list of partners, and each partner even has different levels and tiers and types of reusable identities. And so we map all these things together, normalize it, and surface only the reusable identities that meet your requirements that your users may have. So here's what it might look like. You might imagine a world in which, you know, with the Trinsic product, your user would see a screen that shows them a list of options. The user selects one.

Riley Hughes: They need to authenticate into that place where their reusable ID lives. And then after they consent to share the data, they're good. There's no document scanning. There's no selfie liveness checking unless that's something you need, in which case you can layer that in. And so it is a very seamless process for users. So instead of maybe talking more about it, it would probably be useful at this point to jump into a demo of how this looks. Okay, I have a web browser here with a fake Lego website and my phone over here, which you can see the beautiful Utah mountains and the nice freeway outside of my window here. So if I'm on the Lego website and I'm just using Lego because I like Legos and it's a fairly, I don't know. Recognizable name that probably doesn't do identity verification unless they do somehow, in which case would be interesting to understand that better, but I feel like it's a pretty innocuous one.

Riley Hughes: So if I'm on their website and they need to verify me somehow, I will click this verify button, and we'll see the, you know, see the Trinsic product, which is called Trinsic Connect, pop up embedded in the Lego website. The first thing that I need to do as a user is I need to put in my phone number. The reason for this is that Trinsic uses this phone number as an identifier to query across our network of partners to find out whether this user, or a user with this phone number, has a reusable identity associated with that phone number through any of our existing partners. If so, we send them right there. If not, then they will see a selection screen like I'm about to show you. So this number should not have one. And sure enough, I need to put in a 2FA code. And now you'll see that I'm given a list of options, which was tailored to me based on the phone number that I put in. As a user, I might look at this and think, geez, I don't know what any of these names are. I'm just going to go ahead and scan my government ID, and that's fine.

Riley Hughes: But if, as a user, I see this and say, oh, I have Yoti, or I have Clear, or I have my California DMV wallet app, or something like that, then I can go ahead and click on one and go through it. And I'll show you, you know, if I'm a user that sees that I have a Yoti, I'll go ahead and click on Yoti. It's asking me to scan this QR code with my phone because Yoti is a mobile app-based solution. So I go ahead and scan this. I can see what information that I'm about to share. Pull my phone up in front. I can see what information I'm about to share. Yoti has me confirm my PIN, and then the details are shared across to Lego. And my information is shared with my consent. It's shared without, again, any sort of additional document scanning because I've already done that process with Yoti. And now with the Yoti app, which is where I choose to keep my reusable ID, or as a hypothetical user where I choose to keep my reusable ID, I can use the Yoti app then now at other places as well. So this is just a short demo to show what reusable identity can look like.

Riley Hughes: And now I think it's probably worthwhile to jump in and talk about what this means for businesses. So if you're a business, it's verifying users' identities already, or you're thinking about whether or not you should, or especially if you have had a desire or a need potentially to verify users to reduce fraud or increase trust or whatever it is, but you haven't because it's really high friction, then this is hopefully the section for you. So conceptually, how you should think about it is reusable identity or identity acceptance is something that is a natural process that occurs almost anywhere there is a repeated process, right? So for example, in the 1960s and 70s, in the retail environment, you used to need to create a new credit account and open a new tab with each retailer that you interact with. Until we got portable credit cards, right? Credit cards meant you could use credit from any bank to transact with any merchant.

Riley Hughes: And that streamlined the process and made it so merchants sold more goods, consumers were able to buy more goods, banks were able to lend more money to more people. And although obviously in the credit card example there are, you know, debt is maybe not always beneficial. It can be, and it can be very helpful to grease the wheels of commerce. If anything, it definitely reduces the friction required to transact. Same thing in e-commerce with things like, you know, you used to need to enter your credit card details in every single site. And now whenever I have to enter my credit card details manually, I'm always like, oh my goodness, just let me use Apple Pay or Shop Pay or Bolt or any of these sort of one-click. checkout processes that streamline my transaction. The same thing happened in the login space, where you used to need to create a new login account with every single website you interacted with. And obviously, that evolved into a federated identity model where, you know, you could reuse your login from Google with any website, right?

Riley Hughes: And again, that has its own implications, but it's impossible to deny how convenient it is for users. I mean, people vote with their feet, and they choose to use it because they love it. I mean, it's way more convenient for people. It increases sign-ups on third-party websites that add these buttons. And the same thing is happening in identity verification. Instead of having to rescan your document and redo an identity verification from scratch every time, you know, we have identity acceptance. So this question mark here is sort of, what comes next? Well, the answer is identity acceptance. So let's talk about the benefits for business. First of all, this process of turning repetitive interactions into something portable or reusable is really inevitable. And particularly as people move in a more digital-native life, the only question is how will that be done?

Riley Hughes: Second, by accepting existing digital IDs today, even though Trinsic, for example, has, you know, 60 million reusable IDs in our network, that might seem like a lot, but it's really a small drop in the bucket compared to, you know, the billions of people who will eventually have a reusable identity. And by starting the process today and slotting it in alongside your existing verification process or adding it as a step up for certain interactions, you know, you can prepare for that wave that's coming. And when people come with mobile driver's licenses or with private sector reusable identities, you'll be able to give those users a fast path and help them onboard more quickly into your product. The second, or the third thing is users get more choice. I mean, this was something that was a bit surprising to me as we took this product to market, but it turns out a lot of businesses, you know, they know their users aren't a big fan of scanning their ID card yet again.

Riley Hughes: And so giving them optionality and choice in how they go through that process, or even the perception of giving them choice, really consumers really appreciate and is a benefit. Fourth, it's clearly a better user experience. I showed that, but that results in higher conversion and less drop-off in your flows. Number five, cryptographically secured digital IDs such as a mobile driver's license or high assurance IDs such as CLEAR, for example, which when I registered for CLEAR, they used driver's license, passport, and biometric data and third-party databases to corroborate all of that, right? So it's a very high assurance verification, results in less fraud, right, than equivalent things or sort of Ways that you may try to verify users without giving them as much friction as going to an in-person place to get verified at the DMV or at the airport, for example. And finally, as digital IDs become more ubiquitous, it obviously is lower cost to reuse something that already is there than it is to generate a new thing from scratch, right?

Riley Hughes: And so, I mean, it depends on the scheme, depends on the scale, but over time there will definitely be price compression related to reusable identities. And so identity acceptance can result in lower costs for your verifications as well. Now, this matters for identity companies as well, not just businesses who are verifying users. A lot of people think, oh, this cannibalizes an identity company's existing business model, or, oh, this is, you know, risky for them to do something like this. In reality, the way that I see this market is that today there is a very big market in this little corner of the universe, which is the universe of companies that have a high willingness—sorry—this universe of businesses that buy identity verification solutions today are businesses that have a very high willingness to accept friction and a low willingness to accept fraud. And that's a big universe, right? I mean, we mentioned some of the, you know, Airbnb, Uber, etc. I mean, these are big, big companies.

Riley Hughes: And obviously on the host or driver side, historically they've been well served by identity verification solutions. But as you look at the broader landscape and you look beyond just those very high-assurance use cases for businesses, you start to see an opportunity. That is much, much bigger when it's 10 times faster for a user to prove who they are. Much more proving of identity will happen, especially when it's done in a privacy-respecting way, in a way that's user-consented, right? It's one of those scenarios where, you know, people will be able to be verified at more places, which means that fraud and risk issues at more places will go down because they'll have verifications, which means that services can be offered at lower prices or to new demographics and markets, right? I mean, this is just such a market-expanding opportunity for identity verification companies, and hopefully in partnership with Trinsic, which is our whole approach to this. market, of course.

Riley Hughes: So not only will the market get a lot bigger, but once a user has a reusable identity issued by a trustworthy identity verification company, whenever that user reuses that identity, the originating source or the originating identity verification company can get paid. That means that the market, not only of this sort of the entire market expands, but your footprint within a market can expand if you are the provider of a digital ID to a person who is verified at multiple places, even if those places are not direct customers of yours. So it results in new revenue opportunities, and these are very high-margin interactions as well. As you can imagine, there's two reasons for this. First, because again, if a user already has this reusable identity and they reuse it, you still get paid, but it's a very low marginal cost interaction. And then you can also layer in additional checks, real-time list checking, real-time liveness assurance, and other features, right, on top of the core reusable identity thing, which are high-margin and useful fraud-fighting features as well.

Riley Hughes: And ultimately, I think this move to reusable identity is just a market force, right? It's just how the market is shaping up. And if you are not the one to provide a better user experience, to your customers than someone else will. So, of course, you should be, you know, incentivized or interested in being the best one, you know, the best user experience option out there as quickly as possible.

Moderator: With that, we really want to thank everybody for submitting questions and for attending the webinar here. Riley did a great job answering. If people have additional questions, we can drop, you know, I think Riley's email was mentioned at the beginning. It's just riley@trinsic.id. Mine, you can reach me there as well via email. There's plenty of ways to contact us on our website and social media if you have additional questions. We will be sharing out slides and the recording from the webinar in a follow-up. So if it's something, you know, if your colleague couldn't make it but was curious to learn more, we'll have some more resources coming your way soon. And yeah, anything else you want to share before we wrap up, Riley?

Riley Hughes: Just that I'd love to hear from folks, so feel free to reach out on, you know, social or email or whatever it is.

Moderator: Awesome. Well, thanks again, everybody. We'll be doing this again probably at some point in mid-July, so we'll keep you on the list and keep you updated about when the next webinar is. Thanks all.

Riley Hughes: Thanks, everybody.