Fraud’s Long Shadow Prompts Socure to Enhance Its Identity Verification Solution

In an effort to combat the rise of financial crimes, such as fraud, Socure Inc. has enhanced its know your customer (KYC) identity-verification solution. Socure says the update gives customers stronger tools—such as reason codes and field-validation intelligence, which tests the results of machine-learning models against live data—to verify the identity of new customers during the onboarding process.

The upgraded solution also addresses risk in customer portfolios to verify the identity of existing customers and to identify customers who have opened an account using a synthetic identity.

The inclusion of field-validation information is important because it provides financial institutions a more comprehensive view of the risk concerning a new customer. It also identifies those who need additional review and decline, the company says.

Socure’s KYC solution gathers data to verify a customer’s name, email, phone, mailing address, date of birth, Social Security Number, and other personally identifiable information to confirm a good or bad identity. In addition, Socure’s address-matching technology, covers more than 99.5% of the mailing addresses in the United States, the company says.

“Our customers needed to identify potential risks and discrepancies in the identity-verification process when onboarding customers,” Debra Geister, a vice president at Nevada-based Socure, tells Digital Transactions News by email. “Returning more information to allow customers to identify risks and issues, [and] spot data discrepancies quickly to decide next steps in the workflow process, were the driving force behind the changes.”

Providing financial institutions the ability to authenticate existing customers was based on the growing threat criminals who have opened accounts using synthetic identities have posed. Fraudsters can use these fake IDs to perpetrate fraud or launder money. Socure’s KYC solution will look for signs of identity risk, such as customers opening accounts using the Social Security Numbers of deceased consumers, to help financial institutions to rate the risk of their existing customer portfolios.

“Synthetic identities are of paramount concern,” Geister says. “Identifying potential synthetics and taking a uniform view of risk across the entire portfolio is the goal.”