Ft. Lauderdale, FL - October 10, 2006 - Businesses are rapidly moving away from using social security numbers to identify customers and recognizing that a pet's name may not be the best way to protect financial or other accounts.
"Faced with rising identity theft and data breaches, financial institutions, retailers and others are losing confidence in these outdated techniques," said Verid CEO Kevin Watson.
Verid is responding by introducing a major new version of its industry leading Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) platform that helps businesses quickly authenticate consumers through a series of personalized questions unique to that individual. Verid's clients include 11 of the top 20 financial service providers, 3 of the top 6 telecom/wireless providers and 3 of the top 10 retailers.
The new version enables clients to augment the historical content the Verid platform uses by integrating their own proprietary information. Adding this behavioral content to the process paves the way for companies to expand use of the Verid process beyond account origination into ongoing authentication applications, replacing shared secrets or customer service representative dependent solutions.
"Our customers told us what they wanted at last year's user group meeting and we listened," said Watson. "Our clients wanted to add their own proprietary knowledge about a consumer's activity into our system so they could extend the use of KBA into ongoing authentication. Clients are telling us they want an alternative to social security numbers to identify customers, but customers don't remember unique account numbers. And whether you call it social engineering or pretexting, we're seeing a lot of concern over the risks presented by shared secrets and other traditional approaches to routine authentication. Now the Verid KBA process can solve both of these problems for our clients."
Version 6.0 also significantly enhances its identity validation process by adding adaptive triggers. The Verid KBA system can now adapt in real time to certain triggering aspects of a transaction, dynamically changing verification requirements, including raising or lowering the difficulty of authenticating questions.
One of the adaptive triggers is velocity, which looks at the volume of recent activity involving an individual. To make this more effective, Verid now offers the option to share suspicious transaction information between banks or other organizations by joining a federated velocity group. Another new trigger uses the IP address to determine the geographic location of the transaction, a factor that can raise a high-risk flag. Clients can now also use their internal risk scoring information as an adaptive trigger.
Together these capabilities give banks, retailers and other consumer-facing service companies unprecedented control over managing consumer authentication through online, call center or other channels.
Verid is a provider of real-time authentication solutions that accurately verify identity without compromising consumers' comfort, convenience or privacy. Verid's Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) service helps businesses manage risk and establish and maintain high quality customer relationships. Verid's technology is fully compatible with fraud management systems, and delivers turnkey, highly available solutions backed by extensive client support and data analysis. For further information regarding Verid, visit www.verid.com.
