Spotlight on ID.me – Credential Service Provider (Full Service)

Kantara Initiative Member Spotlight

This month the Kantara Initiative Member spotlight shines upon ID.me, another Kantara member leading the market in digital Identity.

 

1. In which sector(s) and country(ies) do you operate? 

ID.me operates globally and across multiple sectors of the economy including: Government, Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail/Ecommerce, Ticketing, Travel, and Automotive.

2. What is your current market focus and what needs and areas of concern does your service/product address?

ID.me provides a complete, next-generation platform for identity credentialing, to include identity proofing and multi-factor authentication. As part of ID.me’s “No Identity Left Behind” project, we are exceptionally proud that we are able to achieve a high level of trust — NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 — in identity proofing for all demographics, including individuals whose personal identifiers are either not present or inaccurately stored in records. This enables young individuals who might not yet have a financial identity or women who married and changed their name to establish their identity online without having to go to a trusted agent in-person. We call this video chat capability, Virtual In-Person proofing.

3. In what ways does your service/product push beyond the state-of- the- art? 

The main benefits of identity are Access and Security. When these benefits are achieved with minimal friction, then consumers begin to realize significant time savings. To that end, ID.me’s advances in identity proofing for all demographics, and our ability to make that identity proofing event portable across multiple organization’s via ID.me’s Single Sign On and the authenticated consumer’s consent, is truly ground-breaking. More objectively, more than 30,000 users are signing up for ID.me every day and we are zooming through the 15M user mark so the market seems to agree with value proposition.

4. Where do you see the market trending in the mid/long term and how do you see your product/service playing into it? 

The goal is to provide users with a credential they can use to prove their identity across the economy and across channels without having to repeatedly prove their identity over and over again in a vacuum. There is a reason people hate managing passwords. Interoperable digital credentials save people time and frustration, and we are excited that ID.me is positioned to save tens of millions of people time and money when they attempt to complete a transaction that requires trust. 

5. Why were you motivated to join Kantara Initiative and how do you see it helping your organization specifically, and the digital economy as a whole?

The Kantara Initiative plays an important role in the market by signaling that ID.me’s claims about our services have been independently verified and are, therefore, reliable. The trust ecosystem is something like an onion with a layered process that starts with government issuing standards for identity at the core and then moves outwards with the next layer being a group of auditors and assessors to certify solutions that wish to credential the mass market. The Kantara Initiative had a reputation for excellence and for not cutting any corners during the auditing process, so we selected the Kantara Initiative as our community because we wanted to go through an accreditation process the market and our customers would respect. As the digital economy grows, the Kantara Initiative plays an essential role in providing business customers with the confidence that the identity solutions they are considering have been vetted.

6. What other significant aspects about your organization (service/product) should our global community know about? 

We take great pride in the privacy features we have built into our platform. In many ways, ID.me was architected for a GDPR and CCPA world before those laws made privacy a mainstream topic. To that end, we never share a user’s data with third parties without their explicit consent, we apply privacy filters to prevent an application from asking a user for information not related to the underlying transaction, and we honor the user’s right to delete their data with ID.me at any time. It is very cool to see the market adopting these principles as law, and we are excited to have an identity platform that can enable compliance with the new obligations these laws have put upon businesses.

For more information on ID.me, visit https://www.id.me/