Online identification is booming. This is caused by the enormous growth of online shopping, the greater awareness of consumers in the area of privacy and the increasingly strict legislation. For companies, it is also important to know as accurately as possible with whom they are doing business online. A fast and simple identification procedure reduces customer irritation, limits the risks for companies and increases the opportunities to approach verified customers individually.

There are several forms of online identification. The most well-known is probably DigiD, the system that allows the Dutch government to verify someone’s identity on the Internet, a kind of digital passport for government agencies.

However, DigiD is not available to businesses. They need other methods to verify someone’s identity.

With a passport or identity card
Digital identification with a passport or ID card can be done in two different ways. The first is the so-called passport selfie check. A customer takes a picture of his or her passport or identity card and then a selfie. Both photos are compared to check whether the customer is who they say they are. The disadvantage of this method is that customers don’t always look like their passport photo, the camera on their phone is not good enough, the environment in which the selfie is taken is too dark or their internet connection is too slow. This can lead to irritation and a prematurely terminated identification.

The second way of digital identification using a passport, ID card or driving licence is by reading the NFC chip that is in the document. Most smartphones and tablets nowadays have an NFC reader built in that reads the information on the chip of an ID card.

Identity services
The above-mentioned methods of online identification are cumbersome and protracted and therefore unsuitable for web shops or online casinos where customers want to be able to log in quickly. For this reason, more and more companies prefer to work with so-called Identity Services. These allow customers to identify themselves digitally in different places using the same passwords. In addition to providing confidence, they also offer convenience to consumers who have difficulty remembering separate usernames and passwords. For online shops, it increases conversion and speeds up the checkout process.

Identity Services store the verified data of a user. The user can log in at different places using, for example, an app. When a company or organisation is connected to such an Identity Service, customers can login with multi-factor authentication and leave their personal data safely.

Users of identity services can reuse their data once their identity has been officially confirmed. This allows someone’s age to be instantly checked, documents to be signed or to log in with a QR code.

The best known identity service isiDIN. It was introduced in 2016 by Betaalvereniging Nederland and was developed together with the banks. e-KYC e-KYC (electronic Know your Customer) from CDDN uses a number of the solutions mentioned above.

e-KYC
e-KYC(electronic Know your Customer) from CDDN uses a number of the solutions mentioned above. Identity Services and passport- or ID-checking are relatively expensive. CDDN is however capable of verifying up to 75% of someone’s entered personal data within an incredibly fast 200 milliseconds. We do this together with leading PSPs. Items such as initials and surname, address, telephone number, email address, date of birth and gender are checked in no time. The result is a simple 15-letter code that tells you exactly which information does and does not correspond to the data entered.