Identity verification is an unavoidable process for many public and private organisations such as banks, telecom, credit companies and more . And this process continues to become trickier and more complex despite being complemented by digitization. Or else why would people be spending half of their day just getting their passports renewed? Or why will they be spending their evening with customer care executives just to get a new phone number?
The problem is we don’t have a choice, we are bound to follow the company rules,and company in turn are bound by its policies to verify the identity of their customers, thus costing us hours of our time.
And this is not all…
What we talked before was the process of offline verification. Let’s now talk about online verification.
We agree that online identity verification saves time and tons of paper too. However, it has resulted in the rise of a much greater problem, Identity Theft, one which has had over 40 million victims in the U.S. alone so far.
With the world supplying gigabytes of personal information across the internet in the name of identity verification, the web has turned into a ground for cyber criminals to maliciously use personal information according to their needs. Businesses acquire your personal information for authentication and store them either in the cloud or on their own personal server. This central system holding information then is compromised by hackers with the knowledge to extract it from this system. Once that is done, your information is out in the web world and being manipulated and used according to anyone’s and everyone’s personal agenda.
Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising if you see someone holding a driver’s license in your name with exactly the same credentials as yours. You had shared your personal information with some third party on the web and it got compromised.
Equifax — a credit reporting agency lost around $4 Billion as hackers were able to leak information of about $142 Million registered users.
The solution?
While we have been able to solve the problem of wastage of time and resources to a great extent by digitizing the KYC process completely, we haven’t been able to solve the problem of identity theft effectively so far.
The best way to secure your personal information is to have this information under your own control. In the worst possible scenario, this data will only be compromised if someone gets access to your own personal device on which your information is stored.
But how do I then get access to products and services without feeding them my details online?
The solution is to design a system which instead of following an insecure, central server model follows a decentralized authentication mechanism. A system which doesn’t rely on any middleware/online server to verify your information rather directly establishes a link with you whenever or wherever any kind of verification is required.
This way you remain in control of your personal information at all times and also do not need to travel everywhere just to get your identity verified.
Working on this idea are a group of entrepreneurs in Vietnam who have designed VeriME — a digital identity verification platform operating on the blockchain.
This platform performs KYC of customer digitally. By leveraging blockchain, AI and machine learning, it completes the KYC process seamlessly as well as securely.
Customers need to create their profile once on VeriME application by submitting scanned copies of their official documents. Once this profile is verified by VeriME, it can be used to perform seamless verification and authentication with any of VeriME’s service providers like online merchants and insurance providers.
User’s save time by not having to visit service provider’s place every time a need for verification arises. Service providers on the other hand get to save money, resources and manpower by using VeriME’s services.
This way VeriME builds a safe and secure identity verification and authentication ecosystem where both the merchants and customers can carry out business without the need for any physical meeting or loads of document verifications.
It would be exciting to see how the blockchain distributed ledger technology will be able to solve the problem which we all know does exist. VeriME’s ICO is also round the corner. For more details about it, visit https://verime.mobi