We recently spoke with miiCard’s Founder and CEO, James Varga, who gave us some insight into miiCard’s usage, growth, and application to the financial services industry.
Finovate: Where do you see miiCard’s role in the evolving space of security?
Varga: The current market is extremely active and now more than ever trust online, across a number of sectors and countries, is at the top of agendas. This is reflected by government initiatives such as the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) / Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG) in the U.S., the ID Assurance project in the U.K. and Trust in Digital Life in Europe.
As yet, the full market potential for identity and trust online remains unquantified, but in any one aspect it represents a huge opportunity, in aggregate it is simply enormous. Given the unique and patented approach adopted by miiCard, our geographical and industry sector coverage and the uses it supports, miiCard can become the predominant provider in this market.
Finovate: Give some specific examples of how miiCard benefits the banking industry.
Varga: By establishing trust in online identity, that a customer really is who they say they are, miiCard is directly addressing the key pains associated with selling high value and regulated products and services entirely online. Through a patented process that leverages the trust between an individual and their financial institution, miiCard establishes identity to Level of Assurance 3+ (LOA3+) and meets Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) identity guidelines, enabling the sale of regulated products and services purely online.
This translates to three key benefits for financial services, the first being fraud related to identity theft where we can realise reduction of up to 80% in the first 30 days; significant reduction, between 50% to 70%; in dropout rates in the customer onboarding process when offline ID proofing is introduced; and our customer-driven, pay-per verified identity transaction model means the business is only charged for customers who meet the identity proofing requirements, not those who fail to verify, and removes the need for back office or outsourced verification teams.
Finovate: What’s the biggest hurdle miiCard has overcome?
Varga:As a provider of trust online our biggest hurdle has been to create trust within our own core member base. As a disruptive approach we have had to establish traction in a market where there are still a great number of assumptions towards online validation, trust and real identities. We now have a single, trusted digital ID founded on the principles of Bring Your Own Identity (BYOID), it is convenient and flexible providing members complete control over their online identity and personal information. With capabilities across five continents and over 350 million people, miiCard is creating trust online across a range of industries including finance, commerce, trading, gaming, healthcare, recruitment, dating, social and professional networking.
Finovate: How many people are currently using the miiCard platform and how do you plan to grow it?
Varga:miiCard has a core membership base that is quickly growing with each and every participating site that starts to accept miiCard as a trusted identity source. To support this growth we have established a channel distribution strategy to the market and gained a number of key partnerships. These include distributors; resellers; affiliates; technologies; consultancies and data providers. Key relationships include Yodlee; Call Credit Group; PA Consulting; Yubico; and Microsoft.
This market traction is driven by both marketing to our users (our C2C proposition) while selling to businesses (our B2B Identity as a Service platform). For businesses miiCard supports both full API access and a fully hosted offering for SME’s called DirectID. Every participating site becomes a channel and creates context for our members in building trust online. These now include consumer finance, dating, social networking, pre-employment screening and a wide range of other use cases.
Finovate: What is something you tried that didn’t work with the platform?
Varga: We are constantly iterating the product and actively engaged with our members and customers. This agile approach provides its own challenges but allows us to test, assess and deploy functionality at a rapid basis. There are always things that don’t work, things that we could do better and things we shouldn’t even have started – it’s all part of the process.
What is most important is to build the service that our members and customers want while still changing the world.
Finovate: What is miiCard’s latest news?
Varga: We have recently announced our work with Tradehill and PA Consulting and have a number of exciting customers launching throughout the year.
To check out miiCard for yourself, go to miiCard.com or watch its FinovateEurope 2011 demo.