Below is a  guest blog post by Jodi Florence, VP Marketing at IDology, Inc.

While the Internet has made it easier to grow a business, it has also introduced new security challenges for small and big businesses alike. As the techniques of fraudsters grow more sophisticated so must the solutions businesses use to detect and prevent fraud from occurring.

The heart of successfully stopping fraud in a consumer-not-present channel is having assurance you are interacting with customers, not thieves.  Verifying a customer’s identity is important for anyone doing business online.

With identity theft continuing to be one of the fastest growing crimes in the United States, using identity verification helps reduce the risks for both your business and your customers from becoming a victim of fraud.   The key is to automate your identity verification process so that you are able to verify consumers in a way that will keep business moving and without sacrificing customer satisfaction.

So what exactly is identity verification?  Simply put, identity verification solutions help uncover if you are dealing with legitimate, real people.  And depending on the level of verification your business requires, you can also find out if someone is who they say they are even though you can’t see or check their ID in person.

At its lowest level an automated identity and age verification solution allows you to verify information provided by someone, such as name, address, and date of birth, with information that can be found on that person while searching thousands of trusted data sources.  If there is something suspicious associated with the identity, like the address doesn’t match or the person is actually deceased, you will know instantly.  And depending on the level of assurance needed, you can incorporate a set of multiple-choice questions that are dynamically generated based off of the personal history information found on each individual consumer.  These questions are sophisticated and designed specifically so that the true identity owner will know the answer but not someone attempting to be that person.  The end result provides an automated process that helps businesses make more informed decisions about how interactions with consumers are handled while also preventing fraud.

If you are still on the fence about using an identity verification solution, here are some of the benefits our customers see:

• Increased Revenue- Using technology to identify your consumers-not-present keeps business moving forward in a timely manner.  As a result, orders are approved and processed faster thus increasing the opportunity to capture more revenue.

• Decreased Cost of Business- Electronic identity verification decreases the amount of manual review needed to evaluate and legitimize questionable activity freeing up your employees time to focus on other areas of the business

• Improved Fraud Protection- Identity verification gives better insight into potentially fraudulent activity so that businesses can deal with suspicious activity accordingly. Being able to validate someone’s identity quickly reduces the amount of fraud loss.  And by decreasing the amount of data that is shared within a company, it protects sensitive consumer information from being overexposed and limits the potential of an employee misusing a consumer’s information.

• Fulfilled Compliance Regulations – some businesses, such as financial companies and age restricted products and services, have compliance regulations they must follow.  Incorporating an automated identity and age verification solution gives you the resources to quickly comply with legal obligations while providing an audit trail to prove you performed your due diligence on your customers.

About the Author:Jodi Florence is the VP of Marketing at IDology, an identity and age verification solution provider helping businesses of all sizes in multiple industries drive revenue, lower costs, prevent fraud and meet compliance regulations.  For more information about IDology and its identity verification solutions visit www.idology.com

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