Veriff talks upgrading digital ID for financial services industry

Onboarding clients has always been the “big, hairy beast” in banking, with many financial services providers avoiding digitizing identity. 

Financial services are naturally conservative: Instead of innovating independently, they have relied on government solutions, including government-issued digital identity frameworks, says Leda Glyptis, fintech advisor and executive.

“Although we could have immense amounts of creativity, there is a little bit of nervousness around overreaching, around compromising freedom for security or security for access,” Glyptis said during the Veriff Voices podcast last week, produced by identity verification company Veriff.

When performing identity verification, financial services companies also overload their systems with different information to comply with regulatory demands, making it hard to create a single transferable identity asset. This results in the same customer being treated as different people across different products.

Glyptis noted that a couple of years ago, she was optimistic about applying solutions such as reusable identities, such as the Norwegian BankID. The challenge holding banks back right now, however, is deepfake fraud.

The next five years could see the development of different approaches to digital identity. One is “biometrically rich,” offering a million ways to verify an identity. It would be much harder to hack, thanks to the additional bits of information needed for verification, she adds.

“On a good day, I want to see that,” says Glyptis. “On a bad day when I’ve just had a few scary meetings with CISOs, I want to move to a harmonized baseline digital identity asset globally.”

Veriff lays out its own vision of digital ID

When it comes to different digital identity schemes, customers in industries such as financial services, ecommerce or social media have mostly been drawn to integrating government-backed ones. The issue, however, is that there are so many of them, according to Hubert Behaghel, Veriff’s chief product and technology officer.

Veriff sees an opportunity in issuing a “digital passport” which would not be backed by a specific government scheme but by a user’s data and their “good behavior” online.

“That should create some kind of trust capital,” he told Identity Week.

Behaghel also touched upon the issue of fraud: Financial services, for instance, were mostly driven towards identity verification products by compliance requirements. Things, however, are changing as the cost of fraud becomes a driver for fintech companies to adopt identity verification.

Veriff has been promoting its own way of battling fraud and synthetic identities, a twist to the traditional “human in the loop” verification.

The verification approach involves multiple checks and a specialized team of people that offer feedback on a specific check level that didn’t achieve a high enough confidence level, Kaarel Kotkas, CEO of Veriff, said in an interview with Fintech Magazine.

“Humans are the ones who are creative to actually explore all the different avenues,” says Kotkas.

Veriff recently became one of 12 companies named a leader in the identity verification industry by market analysis firm G2 Grid. 

The company has also recently awarded several of its customers with the inaugural 2025 Veriff Trust Awards, including Instacard, Uber, Kueski and Valr. The award was created to honor companies that bring more trust to the online space.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital trust  |  identity verification  |  onboarding  |  Veriff