What is Reverification & Why is it important?

Reverification can be a powerful tool for any online business's growth, and is crucial to maintain trust with its users. It is an important use case for Biometric Authentication, which makes the long, continuous procedure more efficient and effective. 

Many companies worldwide struggle to solve the challenge of reverifying their users to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. On the other hand, customers want to continue using services without doing verification procedures all over again and again over time. This is where reverification solves the problem - the system can authenticate any user's identity in about a second.

In this article, we'll dive deep into this topic and discuss the importance of reverification, its uses, and the main challenges that companies face to reverify their customers.

Why should you reverify an identity?

In order to understand why you need to reverify your identity, it is crucial to know where and how you should use it. 

The need for reverification is not new - companies have been using this system in various guises for a long time. For example, it can be essential to reverify drivers for ridesharing services in the gig economy market. This will help you make sure that they are not faking their identities and completing rides instead of somebody else. Also, it can be a helpful tool for landlords in the housing market - it makes sense to reverify a potential tenant's identity before signing contracts with them.

The many potential uses make reverification a necessary procedure for businesses worldwide that require consistency with their customers. That’s why we need to understand the process to be able to implement it in the right way. 

The reverification process

From the technological point of view, we can use reverification as a tool to keep customers safe from account takeovers or fraudulent transactions. So, instead of going through the whole verification procedure repeatedly, we can simply put a system in place, which gives a result in seconds (in our case, this simply asks the user to take a selfie).   

How to reverify documents

Document reverification is often used to revalidate a user’s identity for businesses that are growing and keep adding new services. They need to ensure that they meet every legal requirement with their existing customers to add new features. With simple additional steps, the system tells customers if they can proceed with the service. 

How to reverify a person or business

Reverifying a person is necessary when you are running a SaaS (Software as a Service) business. It is important to know if the right people are using your service and to make sure that they are not claiming somebody else’s identity. The procedure is pretty simple - they need to take a selfie, and the biometric face matching software will validate them based on their previous data. 

How to reverify assets

Reverifying your assets can be an easy solution for everyone to avoid bureaucracy. Asset verification, in the first place, is the procedure of determining your valuable items. But this procedure is continuous and needs double-checking over time. That’s why reverifying assets can be an excellent solution to save time and effort. 

What happens with a failed reverification?

Reverification is an excellent use for biometric authentication, making decisions based on previously recorded data that the user submitted to use a service. In case of a failure, the company gets information regarding this user, and they can take steps according to their internal policy. Reverification is a tool for them to determine user authenticity and maintain growth more efficiently. 

Challenges of reverification

Companies and organisations worldwide are aware of the challenges that the reverification procedure brings. It is often considered complex, and this has its reasons.

Firstly, customers have developed a fear of identity theft and phishing scams. That could be a great reason why you might be doubtful when reverifying yourself for anything. Also, they don't want to reconfirm their identity for services they've been using for many years already. Still, companies might need this information due to new regulations coming in to place, or a user taking an action they've never made previously (making a larger-than-usual money transfer being a prime example). 

In today's world, where scams, fraud, and identity thefts are happening every day, it is hard for companies to ask their customers to provide any personal information without expecting a potentially negative response from them. This is normal, but companies have to face this challenge and somehow find an effective solution.

Benefits of reverification and why it’s important

As we made clear above, reverification can present challenges, but it equally brings a lot of benefits. If we look at the potential applications, we can see how essential it can be for companies to have this system in place. 

For example, you can use reverification to combat, or confirm, account takeovers. Reverification would confirm that a user's account is not being hacked and the owner of this account is aware of someone else using it. Also, if you notice that one of your users has not logged in to their account for a while, it might be helpful to ask them to reverify their identity to secure both user and platform simultaneously. 

Other than that, it can be useful to implement reverification for specific actions that your users might take on your platform. It can be about transferring money, using delivery services, etc. 

Reverification is important to maintain security and make sure that your customers are aware of changes or updates your business is going through. 

In summary, reverification can be a big part of our everyday digital life. Companies try to secure their systems, which requires users to follow guidelines and reverify themselves with simple steps to protect their accounts from identity theft.

Here at Veriff, we are constantly working hard to make the digital world safer with the tools we build daily. This is why we launched our new product Face Match, which helps you authenticate and reverify customers with Veriff's facial biometric technology.