Digital nomads leading to glut of foreign document admin — researchers

The rise of digital nomads, people working remotely in foreign countries as the pandemic wanes may be causing problems for businesses engaged in identity verification.

New marketing research from Regula, developer of forensic devices and verification software, shows 80 percent of financial companies have experienced an increase in the number of verification cases involving foreign documents.

Forty-four percent of respondents, according to the research, are facing a 25 percent rise in foreign verification volume compared to last year.

Furthermore, 62 percent of these businesses have apparently been forced to verify foreign documents manually.

Incomplete databases of document templates is another issue which is causing problems for businesses. Forty-eight percent of the respondents said they have faced challenges during onboarding because they don’t have all the needed document templates at hand.

The cost of failing to verify identities can be high, too. Forty-seven percent of enterprises claimed the impact of identity fraud for them was greater than $300,000.

In fact, nearly a quarter of enterprises with more than 10,000 employees reported that identity fraud cost them more than $1 million in 2022.

The report was also able to highlight some rising digital identity threats.

Eight in ten respondents said deepfake video fraud poses a real threat to their businesses.

In fact, 29 percent of those surveyed said their businesses had already fallen victim to fraud using deepfaked video, while this number rose to 37 percent for audio deepfakes.

Synthetic identity fraud, in which a mix of real data and fake data used to create an identity, already impacted 46 percent of the businesses the survey looked at.

More generally, the report found that verifying digital document is the most common reality check – 65 percent of respondents said their organizations performed it. Sixty percent are involved in fingerprint biometric authentication and 58 percent used one-time passwords.

Forty-two percent put data protection at the top of the list in terms of constraints that their organizations encounter when deploying digital identity verification.

The second and third biggest complaints were the cost of securing an overly complex tech environment and using different identity verification software, respectively.

Some countries have already taken early steps toward allowing these digital nomads to participate in their own national state ID programs. There is Columbia, for example, which issues a state ID as part of its standard visa.

Regula surveyed 1,069 decisionmakers in banking, fintech, telecommunication and aviation, from businesses in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and France.

Article Topics

digital ID  |  document verification  |  fraud prevention  |  onboarding  |  Regula  |  synthetic identity fraud