How To Ensure Your Organization Can Onboard Gen Z

Much has been written about Millennials, born between 1981-1995, as the most dominant financial force in the market today. 

In a little over a decade, Gen Z, born between 1996-2012, will become the primary consumer group, and therefore the major drivers of our economy. Gen Z currently earns $7 trillion across its global 2.5 billion-person cohort, according to Bank of America Research. By 2025, that income will grow to $17 trillion, and by 2030, it will reach $33 trillion, representing 27% of the world’s income and surpassing that of Millennials the following year.¹

This important segment of the population is clearly the future of your business, but also presents identity verification challenges due to Gen Z’s thin, or even non-existent financial and credit histories compared to prior generations at the same stage of life. GenZ is demonstrating that they are more averse to traditional credit offerings, such as credit cards, partly due to the rise of alternative solutions such as Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) and other personalized solutions that provide immediate buying power at the point of sale without the friction associated with traditional credit offerings. 

If you are still relying on the same legacy identity verification software that has been in place for decades that rely heavily on credit data and counting on the behavior patterns of prior generations to continue, you will turn away a sizable number of these good consumers to organizations that are taking a modern approach to identity verification. Putting these consumers through manual review isn’t an acceptable workaround, as a generation accustomed to immediate results will simply abandon your process.

Socure leads the industry in identifying Gen Z consumers

Socure has always invested heavily in diligent sourcing, evaluation, and analysis of numerous data sources to ensure we have the best population coverage and auto-approval rates, without introducing fraud risk. While credit header data is of course an important data source, we view it as just one of many data sources to accurately verify the identity of a consumer. We constantly evaluate and test trustworthy alternative data sources and leverage AI/ML capabilities to persistently process, analyze, and correlate every facet of a digital identity to deliver the highest-assurance assessments of new users in the market.

Through our continuous innovation, we’ve recently improved our already industry-leading Gen Z coverage with Socure Verify by incorporating new trustworthy alternative data sources that overcome the limitations of legacy solutions that are heavily reliant on credit data. 

Through our most recent enhancements we have achieved:

• 10% lift in coverage rates for 18-25 year old consumers
• 30-40% lift in 18-25 year old coverage compared to legacy solutions
• >3% lift in auto-approval rates across all populations

As you can see below, the gap in coverage and approvals for Gen Z consumers between legacy identity verification software providers and Socure is wide, even before our most recent enhancements. The lower end of the ranges below reflect the youngest members of the Gen Z cohort, compared to the higher end of the range reflecting the oldest.

Socure is quickly closing the gap on the approval rates of Gen Z, and approaching our best-in-class approval rates for mainstream populations.

Still, some members of the Gen Z cohort are invisible to even the best alternative data sources available to Socure. But there is one source that can verify the validity of their identity – the U.S. government. 

Leverage for additional 6-8% lift of hard-to-verify consumers

Instead of declining otherwise unverifiable consumers, for permitted entities Socure can verify the customer’s information with the Electronic Consent Based Social Security Number Verification (eCBSV) service, which verifies consumer-provided PII elements of name, SSN, date-of-birth, and deceased status with U.S. government databases. 

While eCBSV is often thought of as a way to mitigate synthetic identity fraud, it is also tremendously useful in obtaining greater assurance of a valid identity for hard-to-verify populations resulting in greater financial inclusion for underbanked and credit-invisible consumers.

We’ve fully integrated the eCBSV service into our ID+ API, optimizing for accuracy, coverage, intelligence, scale, and cost-savings making it seamless to tap into this powerful authoritative data source.

We can help you onboard more Gen Z consumers than anyone else through our accurate, precise identity verification software without introducing fraud risk. Meet with our experts to discuss your current Gen Z challenges and discover how we have helped organizations like yours modernize their onboarding process for today’s challenges.

¹https://www.businessinsider.com/24-gen-z-trends-40-millennial-spending-changing-economy-2021-9