As additional states opt to legalize online gaming, the industry is becoming a more attractive target for criminals. Operators in the online gaming industry have much to consider when evaluating identity verification solutions. Gaming can be a prime hotspot for identity fraud and money laundering, and bettors may even arrange to drop bets to conveniently lose money to people they need to pay off.
To avoid fraud losses, you need to be just as confident that you know your players’ identities in terms of: “Does this person exist?” and “Should I do business with them?” as you are in knowing your target customer demographic—age, gender, geolocation, online gaming habits, and other attributes.
These questions can be answered with an identity verification check within your new player conversion workflow. Customer acquisition is costly, and the right identity verification solution should not slow down or interrupt your players’ onboarding experience.
There are many myths about online gaming and fraud, but the right approach, with the right building blocks for modern, effective fraud prediction can help online gaming operators ensure rapid, accurate assessments of new players during onboarding and reduce fraud throughout the customer lifecycle. The following are crucial factors to consider when evaluating an identity verification or “know your customer” (KYC) solution.
What Core Capabilities Should an Online Identity Verification Solution Have?
1. Accuracy
A trusted identity verification solution must rely on fresh, continuous sources of online and offline data. This ensures a reliable and valid assessment of whether an identity is real, the person presenting the identity is the true owner of that identity, and that it has not been associated with fraud in the past.
When identity verification solutions use stale data, good customers can be flagged simply because their information has changed or doesn’t meet certain rules-based conditions. This hurts individuals in a number of demographics – those who are new to the country, younger populations, and others with limited, traditional credit histories.
Avoid rejecting good customers by choosing a solution that leverages multiple, current data sources.
2. Low Friction
Solutions that automatically initiate an identity check in the background with little to no impact on the end user experience can provide real-time results and deliver accurate auto-approvals, so that new player friction remains low. The ability to make a highly accurate decision while collecting minimal customer data inputs ensures that your players have a streamlined customer experience and maximizes new player conversion rates.
3. Ease of Implementation
Reduce the complexity of implementing an identity verification solution by investing in a vendor that embraces a digital-first approach using an API and offers multiple identity assessment options to meet compliance requirements. A strong solution can deliver a combination of identity verification methods to meet your organization’s needs while minimizing manual reviews and reducing associated operational costs.
4. Flexibility
Transparency in identity evaluation results enables you to understand why an end user passed or failed, so that the decision is fine-tuned to safely meet risk thresholds for pass, review, and fail. A flexible approach optimizes the process to best fit your organization’s needs.
5. Expert Guidance
Engage with a trusted partner with deep expertise to explore options and solutions that have proven to perform effectively with other organizations in your industry. This will allow you to build an identity verification program that you can trust to optimize the number of good new users and block access for bad actors while meeting compliance mandates.
The Socure Solution
To avoid the pitfalls of online gaming fraud, companies need to invest in identity verification solutions that emphasize accuracy by using persistently updated and correlated data.
Socure ID+, the leading identity verification platform, accurately validates identities with a minimal amount of player data to verify the identity quickly and collects that data for use in compliance efforts. It provides automated onboarding for every good customer through a system rooted in our identity graph and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Instead of relying on stale, static data, our ML models persistently process, analyze, and correlate every facet of a digital identity, using over 17,000 features, redundant data sources, and a network of over 1,800+ customers to deliver the highest-assurance assessments of new users in the market.
Socure examines the personal information provided online by the player to validate their identity and provide an assessment as to whether your workflow should automatically convert them to a customer in accordance with your risk thresholds.
Brigitte Engel is a Senior Director, Product Marketing at Socure responsible for emerging markets such as Buy Now, Pay Later, Cryptocurrency, and Online Gaming. Previously, Brigitte held marketing leadership roles with leading endpoint security companies, including Cylance and Guidance Software, and identity fraud vendor ID Analytics.
Socure is the leading platform for digital identity verification and trust.
Its predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine learning technology with trusted online/offline data intelligence from email, phone address, IP, device, velocity, and the broader internet to verify identities in real time.
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