Commercial uses of identity proofing

Outside of the context of unemployment insurance, the most lucrative use case for identity proofing is in financial services, where know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) laws require businesses to know the real identity of their customers. Many of the vendors in this space concentrate on the financial services sector, where identity proofing is only a piece of the KYC puzzle. (Such vendors’ lack of interest in the government sector means that they are often not on schedule, but it is still plausible to sole-source their services.) However, even the identity proofing component of these services has many use cases:

• Age verification: Uses identity proofing to confirm whether a customer should have access to age-limited products.

• Personal safety: Dating and similar personal services use identity proofing to track customers.

• Fraud detection: Credit issuers want to be sure someone is who they say they are.

• Retailers: Associating online identities with persistent people enables building persistent and accurate user profiles, supporting use cases such as targeted advertising.