A few years ago customers were forced to accept what ever digital access companies provided them, but today with heightened competition and a strong cancel culture, orgnisations have the daunting task of needing to meet customers where they want to be met in order to secure their business. Digital onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC), security, fraud and reverification has to be quick, slick, and secure or customers simply go somewhere else.
This is a problem that businesses have created themselves. Digital identities and customer information are scattered across business units and multiple databases. Every new interaction seemingly requires a new account be created, which only perpetuates the problem.
For customers it becomes an endless loop of account creation, verification, new passwords and entering the same data over and over again. For businesses, it’s a different nightmare of storage, single customer view, security risks, integration with multiple suppliers and wasted money.
But there is a solution in the form of the Integrated Identity Platform, or IIP.
To discuss just what an IIP is and why organisations are fast migrating to them, South African company Contactable held an industry webinar to bring together some pioneering minds in the field. Contactable is a leading IIP in Africa and a specialist in understanding customer digital journeys and how these interface across areas like digital identity, KYC, biometrics, data integration, and more.
This gathering was prompted by an independent report released by Liminal, a digital identity strategy and market intelligence firm that recently looked into the rise of the IIP and how it can create value for both businesses and consumers.
The webinar was presented by the panel you can see below. In clockwise order is Shaun Strydom, Founder, Executive Head and Identity Futurologist at Contactable; Daniel Robus, Chief Revenue Officer at Contactable and Will Charnley, Managing Director at Liminal. Also joining the webinar as a guest speaker was Brandon Cohen, representing the automotive industry with decades of experience in this space.
An IIP represents a single digital platform and integration that allows organisations to easily access the complex technology, workflows, data and services required to enable a customer’s digital journey for products and services. All this, whilst ensuring a simple, safe and frictionless customer journey. This all-encompassing approach is the real magic of IIPs and the reason so many are excited about the topic.
According to Liminal’s research, “the emergence of Integrated Identity Platforms (IIPs) represents a significant shift in the consumer identity landscape. IIPs offer comprehensive end-to-end solutions that streamline capabilities across the consumer lifecycle, enabling businesses to combat sophisticated fraud attacks, enhance the customer experience, and simplify complicated, siloed legacy solutions.”
To illustrate this point, Robus ran polls during the webinar asking the attendees what they valued more between important aspects such as lowering customer friction during onboarding, or lowering customer fraud? What about the complexity of multiple vendors for said onboarding, which may be a necessity as customer numbers increase?
The purpose of these polls was to point out how an IIP, offered through one vendor like Contactable, can provide a seamless user experience (UX) and top rate security, all while cutting down on the costs and complexity of such a solution.
“Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with generative AI expediting the rise in both the volume and complexity of fraud worldwide. Synthetic identity fraud is prevalent, and a platform capable of comprehensively monitoring customer interactions aids in recognizing these threats.. Without a holistic view of the user, combating such issues becomes challenging. The lack of seamless signal sharing exacerbates this problem, and IIPs play a crucial role in facilitating a more effective response,” explains Charnley.
Often when fraud happens it doesn’t simply affect the business, it also affects the customer. Therefore the security that IIP offers also benefits them. The company therefore benefits from increased customer trust, a better user experience and less wait time.
Cohen continues this warning of fraud, commenting on the increase seen in the market, especially now as we approach the festive season where lower staff numbers may be a weak point. The downturn in the economy both in South Africa and around the globe leads desperate consumers to not be as weary of scams and other fraud as they may be usually, creating more problems that an IIP could shore up, regardless of the time of year or state of the economy.
With so much promise from IIP, Strydom and the Contactable team are very optimistic, especially because of their successes so far. In short: people love IIP’s.
“Traditionally organisations are siloed. There are multiple departments that need to talk across these silos. IIPs cut across all of this. It’s an understanding of a single customer with multiple use cases in a complex ecosystem. The user doesn’t care about the complexities behind the scenes and the multiple departments involved… Pre-COVID people were quite reluctant to trust digital technologies because some of them were so new, but as adoption increases it is amazing how people are embracing it. We are seeing customers ask why processes aren’t more digital! IIPs already do what the customer wants by bringing everything into the digital world. If you are serious about your customer and building tailored digital journeys for multiple use cases, an IIP is for you,” Charnley concludes.
If you are on a digital transformation path, and would like to integrate an IIP into your business, organisation, or even governmental body, reach out to The Identity Futurologists at Contactable here.
