The world continues to move toward more digital and frictionless experiences. As more businesses across Canada digitize access to their services, the need for a fast and convenient way to verify and authenticate customers is growing.
That’s why Interac is bringing its decades of experience delivering payments to provide faster and more efficient ways to help Canadian businesses and organizations digitally verify and authenticate their customers.
Interac Verified is a suite of verification and authentication solutions that helps empower public- and private-sector organizations to protect against fraud, simplify their onboarding process, and focus on delivering greater choice for their clients.
Want to know how Interac Verified can help your organization in an ever-more-competitive and growing digital economy?
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What is digital verification?
- Why Canadian enterprises have a growing need for digital verification solutions
- What is Interac Verified?
- Three ways Interac Verified can benefit your business
- How Interac Verified will work (and is working) in practice
- User-centric principles: the Interac foundation for verification
What is digital verification?
Digital verification offers a way for customers to digitally verify and authenticate themselves online before access is granted to a range of services and products. Digital verification solutions can have applications across private and public sectors, often with the aim of simplifying and streamlining the onboarding experience.
Verification solutions can help transform the way businesses are run, by optimizing and automating processes while reducing risks like fraud and security breaches.
The resulting efficiencies are expected to be a boom for the Canadian economy: Small and medium-sized enterprises stand to potentially gain $4.5 billion in added value with access to secure, trusted verification solutions, according to a 2018 whitepaper issued by the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC).
Plus, the DIACC and it’s participating financial institutions have estimated potential net savings of $100 million per institution, thanks to a reduced need for manual processing and less fraud as a result of leveraging digital identity. All in all, the whitepaper provides that digital verification solutions have the potential to generate as much as $15 billion in value across the Canadian economy.
Why Canadian enterprises have a growing need for digital verification solutions
Canadians expect faster and convenient digital experiences. For example, Interac research shows nearly seven in 10 Canadians (69 per cent) polled in early 2023 expect to be able to access all government services online. This is why the need for digital verification is growing, too.
As the digital economy expands, more and more services will offer digital access, including services that require customer verification or authentication. Consumer preference for digital access to these services will propel accelerated growth for digital verification.
To meet the changing needs and expectations of Canadians, businesses are looking for ways to use technology to unlock new use cases and efficiencies — often as an engine for growth.
At the same time, security, privacy, and fraud prevention remain top-of-mind concerns for businesses in Canada. Nearly eight in 10 Canadians (76 per cent) are worried about protecting their online privacy, and seven in 10 (74 per cent) want more control over their online information.
These concerns are also hindering growth and customer adoption: Some 44 per cent of manufacturers and a majority (54 per cent) of retailers say they fail to accept new customers due to fraud concerns.
Verification solutions can help Canadian enterprises meet these challenges. They can transform the way businesses deliver services by helping to streamline KYC compliance processes and reducing manual verification, decreasing the risk of fraud and optimizing customer onboarding.
And implementing digital verification solutions will mean that businesses could serve the public in new ways – including expanding e-services and enhancing e-commerce.
What is Interac Verified?
Interac Verified is a suite of verification and authentication solutions designed to help Canadian businesses digitally verify customer data at scale.
Interac verification service simplifies the onboarding experience by providing customers a convenient option to establish a connection with a participating financial institution using their existing login credentials for faster verification of their data. No login credentials or financial information is shared or accessed during this process.
Interac document verification service enables customers to digitally confirm they are who they say they are using accepted forms of government-issued photo IDs and a biometric liveness check. This is 3-step process which can be completed in minutes.
Businesses can deploy Interac Verified solutions using a single API. A complementary developer portal lets technology teams validate technical requirements and use cases to help them get up and running quickly.
Learn more about Interac Verified here.
Three ways Interac Verified can benefit your business
Benefit 1: Interac Verified can optimize business processes to help streamline compliance processes and reduce fraud
Businesses are looking to digital technologies as an engine for growth. However, the risk of identity theft, fraud and inadequate consumer data protection can cost companies money (and reputation). In fact, more than half of Canadians polled by Interac believe organizations are primarily responsible for protecting their data, and nearly 7 in 10 would hold them accountable in the event of a data breach.
At the same time, Interac survey data tells us customers are experiencing similar feelings of hesitancy around digital interactions: More than eight in 10 Canadians (86 per cent) are tired of receiving fraud attempts, which occur at least once a week for a majority (53 per cent) of adult respondents.
Verifying users through methods that can include their government-issued documents can give businesses confidence that their customers are who they say they are — enabling organizations to grant access and provide services to the right person.
Plus, because it features rigorous authentication requirements, Interac Verified can give businesses and their customers peace of mind.
Interac Verified can help streamline KYC processes, reduce the risk of human error that can result from manual verification, generate cost savings, and eliminate the need for in-person visits – meaning you can reach more potential customers. For industries where businesses must meet know-your-client (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance standards, Interac Verified can help streamline those processes to help reduce abandonment rates and supercharge onboarding processes.
Benefit 2: Digital verification solutions can deliver easier and more convenient customer experiences
Consumers want to interact digitally more and more with businesses, governments and other entities. As a part of this they have the expectation that services that require identity validation should be offered online also, but some current experiences involving the exchange of data over email is antiquated or clunky – and can put their data at risk.
For a business, implementing digital verification solutions can help create more frictionless access to services when identity verification is part of an onboarding or account creation process. By providing potential customers with more seamless and convenient options for verifying their data, businesses can drive more conversions and gain a competitive advantage.
How? Digital verification solutions can help businesses explore ways to reduce many of the friction points that exist today, from executing digital contracts and verifying documents to receiving online payments and conducting employee background checks.
For example, Interac Verified can help eliminate parts of an onboarding process that require customers to bringing physical documents to an in person physical location. They have the option to have a trusted source they already use, like their financial institution, to verify the data using their existing banking credentials.
From a customer experience standpoint, our digital verification solutions help to remove roadblocks to accessing products and services digitally that require authentication and verification. Signing up for a new service or experience, or accessing personal data, becomes much easier.
Benefit 3: Digital verification solutions can help modernize business processes and futureproof organizations
Digital verification solutions present a myriad of opportunities for businesses to drive down the costs of interactions, while helping protect against fraud, driving compliance, and saving precious time.
Once again, the ability to quickly validate a customer’s identification (e.g., birth date, address, driver’s licence) could create opportunities to offer innovative e-services or enhanced e-commerce within a few moments — so you can begin delivering value even faster.
For example, if you’re a real estate agent, being able to offer customers a way to verify their identities digitally would eliminate the need for a physical meeting. It would also drive efficiency of service delivery by allowing customers to prove their identity without delay or paper documentation.
In online marketplaces, digital verification could also help bolster transaction completions and reduce the risk of fraud by verifying buyers and sellers within the transaction journey. (Giles Sutherland, VP, Business Development, Interac Verified and Mike Baxter, CTO at Kijiji Canada, discuss the ways enhanced verification can increase trust for digital interactions here).
Digital verification solutions can also help modernize human resources, enabling employers to easily validate a candidate’s credentials — for instance, confirming an applicant’s past work experience, skills certifications, or academic degrees.
How Interac Verified will work (and is working) in practice
Organizations across Canada are already using Interac Verified to simplify onboarding processes, acquire more customers by giving them an easy way to verify their data, and use digital verification to help meet compliance standards.
Wherever there is a requirement for physical ID to be presented and verified today, a digital verification solution has the potential to be a game changer. Here are some examples of industries where digital verification could be used in the future:
- Telecommunications
- Financial services and wealth management
- Insurance
- Lottery and Gaming
- Retail
Visit this page to explore how verification can create opportunities in your industry or sector.
User-centric principles: the Interac foundation for verification
Interac Verified can help Canadian businesses streamline onboarding processes, bolster security, drive innovation and enhance the customer experience.
Our commitment to innovation focuses on seven core principles:
Visit this page to explore how verification can create opportunities in your industry or sector.
- Fraud Protection: Interac Verified helps provide confidence that you know who your customer is and helps protect against fraud.
- Security: With secure, double-encryption technology, Interac Verified offers a secure verification process.
- Innovation: Businesses can leverage Interac Verified to facilitate simple and secure digital onboarding experiences.
- Interoperability: Interac Verified allows businesses to engage in trusted transactions and services that work across sectors and jurisdictions.
- Access: With Interac Verified, businesses can reach a broader customer base ready to engage with digital offerings
- Choice: With Interac Verified, businesses can offer their customers choice in how they access services, whether online or in person
- Inclusion: Interac Verified empowers Canadian businesses to provide seamless and secure access to digital services to their customers.
Interac has provided Canadians secure access to their financial information for four decades, beginning with verifying Canadians with a secure PIN to access their bank accounts. Building on this trust, security and innovation remains at the core of our verification solutions.
Discover how Interac Verified can give you a secure and convenient way to verify your customers and deliver better digital experiences.
