1 The Challenge

Businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies need to interact with consumers, customers, and citizens online, and identity is a key component of all such interactions. Users need accounts, and to get them they must first register. Some organizations need these users to provide higher levels of identity assurance at registration time, and sometimes periodically after registration. Users must authenticate to use services, and different authentication methods provide different levels of authentication assurance. Information about customer activities can be used for personalization and targeted marketing, which can lead to increased revenue for commercial enterprises. However, such personal information must be obtained and managed correctly to comply with data privacy regulations, which are becoming more numerous and tend to vary in terms of obligations.

Most organizations today have some kind of identity regimens in place for handling customer and consumer accounts, but in many cases, these solutions are insufficient in one or more of the areas listed below.

1.1 Registration, verification, and provisioning

Onboarding processes include registration, identity verification steps, account provisioning, and progressive profiling. The friction at onboarding time can be reduced by leveraging social network credentials or other identity providers, if appropriate for the business case. Some businesses and use cases need higher levels of identity assurance than simple email address verification or linking to other accounts. Options for enriching customer accounts with authoritative attributes and matching users to their government-issued IDs should be present. Moreover, each organization likely needs to customize the onboarding workflows for their users.