Beyond the Password: Prove’s Take on Modern Authentication
Tim Brown, Global Identity Officer, Prove
In episode 89 of The Payments Show Podcast, I spoke to Tim Brown who is the Global Identity Officer at Prove.
Prove is one of the world’s most accurate identity verification and authentication platforms. It is used by thousands of businesses across many industries including e-Commerce, Financial Services, Healthcare and Gaming.
AUDIO VERSION: thepayments.show
Episode Highlights:
Profiting from Identity
The identity space is going to be: how do I take that identity and then bind it to something that allows me to have these user experiences across the web, to enable payments, to enable purchasing, to enable better user experiences, targeted user experiences and things like that. That to me is where the money in identity is really going as opposed to just “oh, I need to onboard”. That's really being commoditized… If you're increasing onboarding success by 35% / 40% / 50%, that's real revenue, especially for your listeners.
Wallet Wars
It's going to be quite interesting whether that ends up in an OEM wallet here in the US, or EU wallets, and specific state-based EU wallets. Globally I think that's probably not 6 - 12 months out, that's probably 24 - 48 months out as we've seen some of those regulations occur, but it's definitely an interesting place. It's a seismic shift for identity from a centralised perspective, to identity from a decentralised and consumer-controlled perspective.
Reducing Friction: A Seamless User Experience
We generally get high marks for the user experience because it lacks that friction: First of all I'm going to go fetch my wallet… pull my driver's licence out... I’ve got to capture it... I'm capturing it in my kitchen… the overhead lighting is really bad so it's reflecting poorly on my document…. OK, let me hide it underneath my countertop, try to block some of the light… Now I've got to figure out how to tilt my camera to get it in there… Then, now let me catch my face…. All of that produces this level of friction. Our approach really is: how can I tell that Tim is in possession of his phone? Can I do that as silently as possible with as little interaction with the end user? We can do that by talking to the to the networks, the cell phone towers, to identify what phone number that is. Then once we have that, we have a rich history of signals and live data that we're getting on a daily basis… and much more.
