Identification Manager: Digital Identity for a Better Customer Journey

With every part of our world becoming increasingly digitized, it is important to establish security procedures to ensure that people are exactly who they say they are. Considering that staff members or business partners do not get to interact in person during the user-customer journey, digital identity verification allows us to dictate what resources a user should or should not have access to. 

As the demand for creating, sharing, and collecting personal information online to validate customer identities rapidly increases, it has become imperative to better manage and protect our digital identities.

This article delves into digital identity and the regulations or standards guiding the gathering and use of an entity’s digital identity. We also discuss why emerging solutions like Mia‑FinTech’s Identification Manager help us create an efficient and more secure identification process.

What is Digital Identity?

Digital identity refers to the collection of information and attributes associated with an individual’s online presence and activities, making it easier to prove our identity online.

Understanding that digital identity is a person’s or entity’s entire online activity, it naturally includes biometric data like facial or voice recognition, fingerprint scans, data from government-issued identity documents such as passports or driver’s licenses, social security numbers, purchase history, etc. 

Digital identity and verification are especially important in industries that leave individuals vulnerable to fraud, identity theft, and other malicious activities. In a February 2023 report, Statista stated that online transactions were estimated to exceed 5.7 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. As more financial transactions are conducted online, digital identity solutions are becoming increasingly important in ensuring security and convenience. Using emerging technologies, digital identity solutions offer a seamless and secure way for individuals to prove their identities, reducing the risk of fraud and enhancing customer experience.

A Brief Overview of eIDAS

The Electronic IDentification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) is a regulation of the European Union that aims to facilitate secure and seamless electronic transactions across EU member states. According to Wikipedia, the eIDAS regulates electronic signatures, electronic transactions, involved bodies, and their embedding processes to provide a safe way for users to conduct business online, like electronic funds transfer or transactions with public services. 

eIDAS regulations have established standards defining electronic signatures, qualified digital certificates, electronic seals, timestamps, and other authentication mechanisms to enable electronic transactions. These standards ensure electronic transactions have the same legal validity as paper-based transactions.

The Mia-FinTech Identification Manager

After collecting verified data and information of a customer through a set of procedures known as Know Your Customer (KYC), it is important to validate and authenticate this data to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information; this process is called the identification process.
Identification processes ensure that an individual’s identity matches the one it is supposed to be and that this identity is authentic and trustworthy. Implementing a robust identification process is crucial in protecting personal information, ensuring compliance, and maintaining the trust of customers and partners. However, creating a secure and convenient identification process can be tasking and time-consuming. To address this, Mia‑FinTech has created the Identification Manager to streamline the creation of our Identification process.

Mia-FinTech Identification Manager is a single end-to-end solution that allows us to build our customized identification process and connect it to multiple certified identity providers.

With the intention of simplifying the identification process, the Identification Manager has also implemented tools like the “back office” and dashboards for monitoring the identification process.

The “back office” is a single-site management of all identification processes to easily monitor their status independently of their provider. On the other hand, the dashboard monitors the status and number of identifications for each integrated provider.

The Mia-FinTech Identification Manager also boasts a flexible architecture that allows us to add new microservices without taking apart the entire system. It also comes with templates featuring ad hoc interfaces that enable us to create new custom identification steps.

Digital Onboarding

Encompassing the entire identification process is digital onboarding. Digital onboarding is the process of integrating new users into a digital system or platform through a series of online steps and interactions. It enables identification and certification of identity. 

The digital onboarding process is split into four distinct steps:

• Acquiring personal data through Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Email address and phone number verification through a one-time password (OTP)
• Checking identity document’s authenticity and validity
• Verifying that the customer coincides with the documents uploaded using different methods like liveness video, face checking, recognition by the operator through video call, bank account, etc. 

Under the hood, customer recognition and identity check are done by trusted and certified identity providers like Itsme, BankID, France Connect, and SPID.

Using the Mia-FinTech Identification Manager, you can build a fully customized digital onboarding process, selecting and composing the steps you need. 

For instance, you can create a digital onboarding process that includes OCR, OTP, and a video call with an operator. Then, you can create another process for a different product, including OCR, facial recognition, and a liveness video. You have full control over the steps, and you can customize the process according to your needs.

Also, certified identity providers (e.g. SPID) can fully replace the identification steps because the identity they provide is already certified.

Security and Compliance

The Mia-FinTech Identification Manager is compliant with local regulations and standards. The timer service, one of the component of Mia-FinTech Identification Manager, deletes all user data and related files after a configurable time, and only data related to the process remain in storage to update the accounting part. Thus, we can use the identification Manager to implement our identification process without worrying about directly managing security.

Advantages of the Mia‑FinTech Identification Manager

Understanding what the Identification Manager is and what problems it looks to solve, this section explores some of the key advantages of using it. Not to forget enhanced security, improved user experience, and greater efficiency in managing identities and access to digital resources, the main benefits are:

• Composable Identification flow: The Identification Manager allows us to build a custom identification process or steps according to our business needs
• Easy identification provider interaction or replacement: The Mia‑Fintech Identification Manager provides templates to speed up new identification provider integration
• Easy debugging: The Identification Manager delivers a unified data schema with the information extracted from different identification services or external providers.

Conclusion

The Identification Manager is an end-to-end solution that covers all the stages in the identification process; it offers excellent flexibility in terms of customization and integration possibilities.

Thanks to the Mia‑FinTech team, the Identification Manager is now available on the Mia‑Platform Marketplace together with the Payment Integration Hub, strengthening the offer for Fintechs. Sign up for Mia‑FinTech’s newsletter so you don’t miss any updates on this and other fintech-related initiatives!