1 Introduction

Digital identities have emerged as a central theme for the success of organizations in the digital age. The digital journey, be it as a consumer and customer, a citizen, or as part of an organization’s workforce, always starts with onboarding and continues with recurring authentication. Identity verification, in times of using digital services and remote work, has become a major theme. It is the first step in the digital journey. It also impacts how well onboarding works. Done right, drop out rates during onboarding will decrease and user convenience increases. Also, simple yet secure, passwordless authentication is essential for keeping churn rates low and improving the user experience.

With digital identities being constantly under attack by a wide range of attack vectors, such as ubiquitous phishing attacks, digital identities need strong protection. The art is in combining user convenience/usability with strong security, instead of the traditional trade-off between usability and security. Only if identity verification and recurring authentication work both smoothly and securely, will organizations succeed in their digital journey.

Figure 1: The demand for verified identities is growing with the majority of organizations indicated their need.

This is well-understood by organizations, with more than half already seeing verified identities as essential or valuable to their organizations, and most others considering these technologies as well.

Over the past years, the markets for both identity verification and for passwordless authentication have evolved significantly. We see a growing number of vendors in both segments as well as a lot of innovation, including standardization around decentralized identities. However, in most cases, these technologies are provided by different vendors and rarely in a combined offering. This increases the efforts of organizations in adapting these technologies.

Moreover, a lack of close and proper integration between identity verification and authentication not only increases cost by having multiple solutions in place and higher integration effort, but also increases the risk of security breaches.

1Kosmos has established itself as a vendor that delivers integrated support for identity verification and for passwordless authentication, that supports all types of users from workforce to customers, consumers, and citizens from an integrated platform. This, for instance, enables organizations to serve their workforce with consumer-grade simplicity of access while benefiting from enterprise-grade security in authentication.