Welcome to the “Super Bowl” of Digital Identity

The Super Bowl brought to light a clear message: digital-first commerce has taken hold across even the most unexpected markets, and it’ll require 100% trusted digital identity to sustain new growth.

The Super Bowl is, well, the “superbowl” of advertising. It’s a gauge of what’s driving consumer spend and revenue as measured by pop culture.

From online car sales to mobile mortgages, one-third of the nearly 60 Super Bowl advertisers represented a fast-evolving world of digital commerce, where increasingly complex—and risky —services are available to consumers via mobile or web channels.

Before pandemic lockdowns, innovators pushed toward digital-first and digital-only services in expected areas, such as fintech, media and gig economy models. This placed a demand for rapid and accurate identity verification, KYC, and instant day zero fraud decisioning for riskier account openings.

But lockdowns flung nearly every market into a short-term digital-only environment, including those once defined by physical interaction—medical care and home sales, for example.

This evolution has also driven a deeper entrenchment of digital services in unlikely spaces. Healthcare providers have launched bi-directional messaging and medical record apps with built-in bill pay, gaming systems allow players to gift each other points, freelance job markets include booking and payment features.

Back in 2019, McKinsey forecasted that digital identity would play a role in unlocking about 4% of GDP value in North America by 2030. The underlying concept was that identity is the literal front door of every new account and subsequent transaction on the internet. If Super Bowl advertising is a measure of growth, we may hit those forecasts in 2021.

Recent modeling work completed with One World Identity projects a growth to $30b in digital identity spend, driven by virtual health care, gaming and government use cases in addition to more expected financial services and retail models.

As everything goes remote and digital, the potential for innovation is endless—but so is the risk. Identity verification and fraud prevention take on a much weightier role when the transaction at hand is an $80,000 car theft or a full complement of personally identifiable information, including medical history. And yet the need to rapidly acquire consumers without friction remains central. From the consumer’s perspective, if onboarding doesn’t happen quickly enough, they’ll click away to a competing online psychotherapist.

For us at Socure, this next phase of commerce requires nothing short of 100% trusted digital identity to unlock accounts at day zero with continuous protection throughout the customer lifecycle. This means end-to-end identity solutions as table stakes, including full-coverage KYC and identity verification, omnidimensional fraud decisions, and document verification. Further, it places a new demand on market-agnostic, persistent and portable entity resolution along with passive verification which allows consumers to safely move across digital ecosystems without friction.

I hope that next year’s Super Bowl ads reflect an era in which we can go to the movies instead of ordering them online—or test drive a car instead of taking a virtual ride. But I also know that a vaccine won’t prevent consumers from embracing the convenience they have found in many of these new digital services.

At Socure, we will be here to provide 100% digital identity trust with end-to-end solutions that aim to unlock commerce innovation while protecting digital thrivers and their consumers. For us, it’s a clear touchdown.