After many years being active in the identity industry and having witnessed the continuous and countless discussions about how to eliminate usernames and passwords and find a centralized, adequate solution for remote ID verification, it has become clear that this problem still exists everywhere. Proof of this is shown for example by the high number of account takeovers and ever-increasing levels of ID theft and fraud.

Passwords credentials are still present in our online lives in nearly all cases where we want to access a website or platform. While all other markets have evolved and adapted new technologies, it seems impossible for the online world to leave this Achilles heel of IT behind. Why can’t we overcome this weak part in the identification process?

YourID’s journey started with the wish to answer this very question. A journey with just one goal: to eliminate the need for usernames and passwords and to search for a safe way to interact online and to find the right technology solution for remote identity verification. YourID was created with the desire to develop a solution that accomplishes this goal, while staying independent from any organization, and not being driven by a commercial agenda.

Over the last few years we have made a profound analysis of the market and arranged many meetings worldwide with leading platforms and websites in social media, e-commerce, entertainment, financial services and many other verticals. The goal of these meetings was to unravel the reasons why a universal identity platform that functions across all industries does not exist yet. And to understand the industry’s needs and to create a solution that reflects these needs and is attractive for all parties involved, including globally leading online platforms and websites.

In addition to the many meetings with leading online platforms and websites, there have been many meetings with other industry stakeholders, alliances and consortiums (like the EEMA, ID2020, DIACC and Find Biometrics), and governmental organizations (like the European Commission’s Digital Single Market and eIDAS teams and DHS/Department of Homeland Security USA), that provided additional input regarding the wishes from the identity industry and the perspective from policy makers.

Furthermore, nearly all seminars and webinars that have been organized over the past few years in the digital identity space have been attended. This has provided further in-depth understanding of the problems and needs of the identity industry from various angles.

During our journey, we realized that the search for a technology solution is not the biggest challenge, since many great technologies to solve the problem already exist. The main challenge is to find a method that would be accepted across all industries and by all types of online stakeholders, and affordable enough to ensure that the entire online world could have access to it and adopt it. Not just a solution for the big and powerful, but fit and accessible for the entire industry and on a global level.

For online users, these can be summarized as follows:

• Lack of Privacy & Control

Online users nowadays don’t have control anymore over their identity. They don’t have one single overview of all places where they have shared their information previously, since it is impossible for users to keep track of all these places and to remember with who they shared what private information. In addition, in most cases users are not able to see which personal information is required from them and which is optional to share with a service provider. And neither do users have a simple method to revoke consent to access their information or ask a service provider to delete their shared information. Furthermore, many systems track user activity, profile users and have access to users’ sensitive personal information, not respecting the user’s privacy.

• Inconvenient Online Access

You can buy products from any store using a single payment card, and you can travel the world with a single passport. But when it comes to accessing accounts and services online, there’s a whole maze of processes and requirements to navigate. A bank might send you a one-time password via text message for example, while a mobile wallet may require a face scan to authorize a transaction.

But none of these solutions are universal. With each app or site requiring its own access method, users end up juggling dozens of different passwords, PINs, and other access methods – and often just give up out of frustration. It’s not uncommon for someone to have an entire booklet of passwords for various logins.

Users still need to remember complex passwords and use a variety of technologies and access systems to sign in to their online accounts.
We are getting more and more online and this online development with a growing variety of localised solutions and apps cause an undesired, ever-increasing amount of access credentials that users need to manage.

• Increased Risk for ID fraud

The use of passwords is the weakest link in the security chain. It’s more often the case that an individual will simply reuse the same password over and over again, which is an extremely risky approach to online security. In addition, users need to leave ID information at many different places since they nowadays need to use a different app for each online access situation. This has resulted in a growing number of data breaches, the most serious consequence of which is that users’ sensitive information like usernames, passwords, payment details or social security numbers are leaked, which results in increased risk of ID fraud.

Security has become a priority for the market with the number of fraud cases increasing. According to LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ 2019 report True Cost of Fraud, in the retail sector alone, fraud attempts have tripled since 2017. Meanwhile, last year’s  TransUnion study found that almost half of all consumers were worried about being victims of fraud. For 2020, Industry professionals expect a record increase in cases and costs related to ID theft and fraud. People don’t want to put themselves at risk, but they lack a simple and effective solution for online security.

For businesses, the challenges can be summarized as follows:

 • Significant costs for IAM. A lot of money is wasted on multiple solution providers or on building and/or maintaining your own IAM solution, resulting in high costs.

• Losses to fraud and high IT costs. Businesses incur significant costs due to password reset requests and customer service costs because of complaints stemming from identity fraud.

• Sub-optimal conversion rates. Caused by the fact that customers cannot easily create and access online accounts and verify their payment information. This results among others in abandoned shopping carts.

• Incomplete user data. Not having the right data about your clients results in inefficient marketing efforts on users that have a low probability of being interested in your offers.

• Compliance difficulties. Especially with KYC and AML regulations such as PSD2, CCPA, GDPR.

• Sub-optimal customer satisfaction. Caused by unreliable authentication processes that create friction and are not user-friendly.

The challenges regarding access with passwords and usernames, privacy issues, identity fraud and data breaches have resulted in a growing resistance and inconvenience in the way that we access and use the Internet, inefficient business processes and a bad user experience.

These challenges can only be addressed by a cross-industry collaboration that encompasses all sectors and should not be built around a single access-situation but be built around the user, and enable access to any online location worldwide with just one single solution. It should be based on a collaboration in which parties in all online industries and technology sectors collaborate on a global basis to offer a single solution for users to securely and conveniently manage their online identity and access any online location worldwide.

Further encouraged by recent and upcoming legislation (GDPR, KYC, PSD2, CCPA, etc.), this has resulted in the need for a globally operating identity platform, suitable for all markets and not being managed by a commercial entity and neither be controlled by a minority group of stakeholders.

Instead, it should be managed by an independent non-profit entity, be fully controlled by a wide variety of leaders from all online verticals, be supervised by an independent authority and fully respect all guidelines of user privacy. Only under these conditions can it ensure collaborations with all participants in the entire online industry worldwide.