Regardless of device or vendor, today’s consumers demand digital convenience and access anytime, anywhere. This expectation for accommodation creates an opportunity for organizations to drive business growth and offerings through new digital channels.

Consumers want a frictionless experience — whether they’re making purchases, opening accounts or filing claims. But what happens if they’re presented with too many steps or complex security blockers? The potential results are abandonment, movement into more costly channels or lost sales opportunities.

This expansion of digital convenience and business growth introduces the risk of digital identity. How do you create a circle of digital trust?

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Know Your Circle, Create Your Circle

Organizations must consider the following user types when creating their trusted inner realm:

  • Anonymous and first-time users: Those who are unknown or new digital identities (i.e., an organization has no history of the user’s activity).
  • High-risk users: Those that are high-risk for malicious activity and have known fraudulent patterns.
  • Trusted users: Those that are known users with trusted activities and patterns.

Which of these groups of users can you safely let into your circle of digital trust — and how do you distinguish who is who? The circle of digital trust begins with establishing context around the user. Organizations need to evaluate a user across a variety of factors to determine if they should be granted access to the circle.

The following questions can help you with this process:

  • What is the current activity being performed by the user?
  • What device is being used?
  • What attributes and entitlements are known about the identity?
  • What are the behavioral patterns?
  • What is the external environment (e.g., network and geolocation)?

In addition to the context of the user across a variety of risk indicators, it’s critical to perform this assessment throughout the digital journey. The more indicators incorporated into the scoring system, the more effective the assessments. The more transparent the assessments, the better the delivery of the frictionless experience and trust consumers demand.

Continuous Digital Identity Trust Completes the Circle of Trust

For organizations to create their circle of trust, they must first establish digital identity trust across the omnichannel customer journey. This means acknowledging that users will continue to interact on multiple channels, including web, mobile, call centers, kiosks and even branches.

There are three key ways to create this trusted inner digital circle:

  1. Provide continuous identity assurance: This helps organizations identify unauthorized access and activities transparently across the omnichannel journey, delivering a frictionless customer experience.
  2. Utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning: This will augment risk and fraud expertise. Cognitive technology and analytics from global, real-time threat data delivered through the cloud allows organizations to receive the latest research on emerging trends and patterns within the evolving global threat landscape.
  3. Realize the power of a scalable and agile cloud platform: This allows organizations to establish cross-organizational, actionable insights via real-time assessments and an agile environment.

To deliver a frictionless experience, organizations should consider real-time, multilayered assessments that can help to create their circle of digital identity trust. The IBM Trusteer platform is designed to help companies quickly and transparently establish this digital identity trust across the omnichannel client journey.

Do you have what it takes to become a Trusteer Digital Trust Academy Operative? Play the game to find out

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