Reaching the Underserved: Perspectives on Hard-To-Verify Consumers

Garient Evans:
Hello and welcome. Glad to have everybody joining us here for the webinar on Reaching the Underserved. I think we'll take at least a minute to let folks join and then we'll kick things off. We are scheduled for 45 minutes and the format of today's webinar is interactive. There will be a number of polling questions that we'll put out to the audience during the course of the webinar. We expect to speak for about 30, 35 minutes, and we want to reserve time at the end of the webinar for questions. So again, interactive format. If you have questions, go ahead and submit those in the chat feature and so you can send your questions. We will curate those questions, and Mike and I will get a chance to answer those. So there's a Q&A function.

Go ahead and submit your questions in the Q&A and we have a team standing by that will go through those and send them our way, and Mike and I will answer them. And Mike will give it another 30 seconds. We're going to do some introductions. We're going to delve into the topic of reaching out to the underserved, and we have some poll questions and some Q&A.

Mike Engle:
Sounds great.

Garient Evans:
All right. So why don't we go ahead and get started. Again, welcome everyone. We're delighted to have you here at the webinar focused on reaching out to the underserved. Our good partners, 1Kosmos and Enformion are co-hosting this and the topic is a very special interest to us in our joint missions of providing authentication and security for businesses and governments as they go on to try and interact with consumers in the US. And joined here today is Mike Engle. Mike, why don't we have you introduce yourself and I'll do the same.

Mike Engle:
Thanks for having me on. This is a really interesting topic and there's a lot of activity in the industry around this. We're looking forward to talking to. My name is Mike Engle, co-founder and head of strategy at 1Kosmos. I'm an information security guy by trade. I did that for 20 years before it was called that. Built and scaled the program at Lehman Brothers and then moved into the venture back startup world after their demise. I've just been doing all identity for the last six years or so and it's been a lot of fun.

Garient Evans:
Thanks Mike. And I too have been focused on identity predominantly in the US but globally. And I've been building identity verification and business verification solutions for about almost 15 years now, but in the credit and risk space for about 20 years. I've been with Enformion now for a while and it's an exciting time to be in the business verification and consumer verification space. Excited to build products here. But something that continuously comes up is these hard to reach populations, folks that you might call thin-file, no-hit underserved. And the partnership with 1Kosmos allows us to do something unique and special in the verification and in the coordination of providing products and services to these populations.

And so later on in today's chat, you're going to see some technology that 1Kosmos and Enformion have put together, and is an attempt to safely and securely authenticate these populations. But before we do that, we're going to jump in and talk a little bit about this population. Before I do that, if you don't mind, Mike, can you share with our audience who is 1Kosmos and what does it do?

Mike Engle:
Yes. Well, going way back to the beginning of the universe, I say that because Kosmos means universe in Greek. And when the company was founded, we had the idea of you having one identity no matter where you go. I'm sure you live this dream every holiday season when you go shopping and create 30 accounts online just to buy something or prove who you are over and over and over again to open up different financial services, go get a loan or whatever. And that process is broken. And so there's now technologies and standards that allow you to own your identity, verify your identity, and use it over and over again. And that's at the heart of what 1Kosmos does. It lets you prove who you are remotely and use that proof anywhere.

In turn that could be passwordless access to your corporate systems with a verified identity or accessing financial services. And the side benefit of using identity is there's no more username and passwords. So that's kind of our core mission.

Garient Evans:
And Mike, I've heard loud and clear that you come from security background. There's a real interest in making sure that these interactions are safe and secure. Can you share a little bit about your perspective on that?

Mike Engle:
Yes. There's many ways to do identity. The incumbent way and the old way is let somebody else hold your identity stuff and they'll pass it on for you when it's time. Facebook, Google, in some ways Apple, Microsoft, right? They know a lot about you and can share that with others. That federated model is broken, it's been backed by advertising, it's really slimy. So now because of modern devices that we have access to high res cameras, you can engage with somebody remotely like you can in-person. Think about it, you go to the TSA checkpoint, you look at a driver's license and you look at somebody's face and you say that's them. And you can do that remotely now. But to do it right, you have to do it in a way where you call privacy by design, which means the user has to be in control of it.

If I give you the ability to work with me, you can't keep a copy of my face and go use it to see if I'm a bad actor somewhere else. It's not how it works or how it should work. And so that fundamental, the user is in charge is a design principle that we've had and really important to develop trust in these technologies as they get adopted by millions and eventually billions of people.

Garient Evans:
Mike, that's fantastic. And that's why we've partnered with 1Kosmos. Enformion shares this mission, this idea that everybody in the United States should be able to get access to products and services and that they should be at the center of that experience. And as you said, controlling it. Enformion is trying to find ways to make it easier for particularly these underserved, unbanked populations to be able to get access to benefits, products and services. So let's explore that population. The key idea, the key concept here is that billions of dollars every year is going to waste when folks are trying to interact with populations of which there isn't a lot of information known about them. And the way our ecosystem works today is credit bureaus are the major repository of data, and that's because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FCRA says, financial institutions have to report data about experiences they have with borrowers to the credit bureaus.

And so there are populations, it's hard to believe in this day and age, populations of people who have no loans, no relationships with financial institutions, and very little is known about them. So the question that we want to tackle during today's webinar and through our partnership is, how can you decode these populations? We know that some of these folks may represent fake or synthetic fraud. Some of these folks may be imposters, they've stolen the credentials or the information of legitimate consumers and are posing as them. But even more importantly, we think a significant population exists that is just underserved and unknown and that is completely legitimate and we have to work together to verify them.

Mike, how often does this come up in the 1Kosmos world? The idea of populations that are hard to interact with and hard to verify?

Mike Engle:
Well, often would be all the time, every day. I think we get into some of the specifics on the numbers in a little bit. It's a surprisingly large number, and I've seen these populations talked about quite a bit in the identity working groups that we participate in. So we're actively involved in organizations like Kantara and FIDO and have exposure to, there's other groups that work on this woman and identity and so forth. So they're quite a significant number of people. And like I said, I think we'll have some stats on that in just a minute.

Garient Evans:
That's right. So let's do some definitions and get to the stats. So underserved, underbanked, thin-file, no-hit. These are all terms that refer to these populations. And let's talk about thin-file and no-hit. When I was 18 years old and opened up my first credit card, that's the first circumstance that I've taken out a loan. And the credit card issuing company, I think it was Discover who did a great job offering student credit cards back in the day. Discover reported to a credit bureau. They may have in that instance a single credit bureau relationship or they may have multiple, and they report to the credit bureau about my performance on that credit card. And they do that on a monthly basis. If I changed my information at Discover, if I had a new address, a new phone number, a different contact information like email, they would report that to the bureau.

And in turn, when I went to go and open up my next account with whoever, it could have been an auto loan, the auto loan company would check the credit bureau and see if they had any information about me. And under that circumstance, if I have one trade line, I would be known as a thin-file. Very little information is known about me. And again, that's 18 year old Garient. If you fast-forward, I have had multiple trade lines and have relationships with multiple financial institutions that are all reporting to various credit bureaus. I am now what you call a thick-file. My wife would say Thickheaded, but thick-file is referenced to multiple trade lines, lots of information known about me. A no-hit is a request that goes out to a credit bureau and they just can't find that individual. So again, thin-files, you can measure this, you can measure how many individuals have one, two, or three trade lines.

So very little is known about them. And how often do you submit a request to a credit bureau or a financial institution and it comes back with a no-hit. So another term for these are underserved populations. These are folks that are hard to verify, so they don't get accounts opened and they don't get products and services because of that. And same for underbanked. Mike, we in the US being democratic, we think everybody should get equal access. But why does this population matter? Why would institutions or the clients that you serve want to be able to easily and authentically verify these populations?

Mike Engle:
Well, there's several reasons. One is they want to serve them for profit reasons. Of course, more customers, more services, more better. But these days I think there's a lot more focus on these populations across all disciplines, not just financial services, but how you hire, there's a lot of efforts, a lot of awareness in the world. So people want do the right thing. And think about how difficult it is if you were to go out into the world and can't spend or deposit a dollar. If somebody sends you a check and you know, just can't cash it, right? Because you can't prove who you are. It's just some real basics and we'll cover some of that as we discuss this today. It's a combination of it's not fair and there's more people that can be served, so let's try to serve them.

Garient Evans:
Yeah, Mike. And as we look in the news, we see that it's actually a question of regulations in legality. And if fines and enforcement actions are any indication, the government takes it seriously that institutions have services in place that make it easier to interact with these populations. And so we keep teasing that we'll get to how big is it? We have some stats. The CFPB has done an extensive study and took a look at the thin-file population and estimated through their studies with their different credit bureaus that about 8% of all adults in the US, approximately 20 million adults fit into the thin-file population. And that is one in 10, a little bit more than one in 10 of all black and Hispanic adults fit into that category.

And then if you take a look at the no-hit population, a little over 11%, 26 million adults. And that's well over one in 10 black and Hispanic adults fit into the no-hit population. These are folks that predominantly live in a cash circumstance. They may have their paychecks cashed at a check cashing facility or prepaid debit cards, and they are not working in the traditional financial services space. And so they become nearly impossible to verify. So 40 million, almost 45 million adults, a significant share of the US population.

Mike Engle:
These numbers, those are real numbers. Right? You're talking, anytime you use the word millions.

Garient Evans:
That's exactly right. And then for all of you marketers out there, all of you growth officers, there's this other definition of unbanked. And these are folks who live their daily lives doing payday loans and check cashing and prepaid cards. And they're not working in the traditional banking system, so they don't have a checking account, they don't have a savings account. Those of us who have worked in an identity, we've seen a trend recently for open banking, that open banking will be one of the ways that we can establish relationships with maybe a marketplace. Maybe I want to have a rideshare experience or some other experience that takes advantage of open banking as a way to verify my identity. But we think that about six million households, and if you think two adults per household, well over 10 million people have no bank, credit union or other banking relationships.

So still a very significant number of people out there. That's going to lead us, Mike, into one of the polling questions that we asked our audience to respond to before today's event. And here are the results. We asked our audience, in your world, and you audience members are in banking, FinTech, payments, and government services, how many of your individuals are unscorable or no-hit? And it's not a surprise that about 40% say less than 10% of all of these onboarding events come back as no-hit. But that means about 60% of the respondents tell us that 10% plus of their applications for products and services are coming back as no-hit. And we had three percenters respondents tell us that half are coming back, half or more are coming back as no-hit and as no ability to score. Mike, what do you think of these results?

Mike Engle:
Well, it's showing that people are certainly aware of the problem. I'm sorry, did you mention the types of organizations that were in this poll? Was it pretty broad?

Garient Evans:
When we saw who responded, we have banks, we have FinTechs, credit unions and representatives of different government agencies all telling us that this is their experience.

Mike Engle:
So it's pretty authoritative. I think these numbers are in line with some of the statistics that you gave in those populations, right? So 8.3%, 11%. It's really validating the data and people's understanding of what's happening inside their own organizations.

Garient Evans:
And Mike, we went back and made this claim that billions of dollars are being wasted trying to target populations that can't be authenticated. How do you see this play out with 1Kosmos as you're interacting with clients and customers and their pain points? What are they trying to solve for?

Mike Engle:
Well, they're trying to serve these populations for the two before mentioned reasons. So one is just to increase the population of people they can reach. But the second is to either because they're being mandated just like there's disability requirements and accessibility and so forth, that you'll have to be able to serve people equally. And some of the standards bodies that I participate in such as Kantara and NIST 363-4, this is a big part of the topic. I don't have a driver's license. How do I consume online services? I don't have access to the right type of phone, et cetera. So it is of top of mind that we're not spending all of our time focusing on this, right? Because it's a percentage of the problem. It's not really edge case, it's a beyond edge case because it's so many millions of people.

It's a focus for us and something we have to solve as an industry. And we'll talk about that when we get into our little back and forth here about some of the options that are available now to really all organizations.

Garient Evans:
You're exactly right, Mike. And I would say that one of the reasons we decided to partner is Enformion's database. And I think it's fair to call us a database company, has a different way of collecting data, and we've got about 6,000 data sources that gives us the ability we think, to see about 98% of the US adult population. And so that's going to set us up for this next poll question. It's the first one that we have for our audience. And so we're going to open up the poll. We'd like you to give us your thoughts. As you are looking at the underserved and unbanked, these thin-file populations, what's your biggest area of concern? Does your compliance and risk team tell you, hey, there's fraud in that population, they're hard to verify, we don't want to lose money?

Is your compliance team telling you, you have to do this and you have to find solutions or you're going to be out of regulation? Are you worried that these populations can't pay you back if it's a loan? Or are you just concerned about, I don't know how I'm going to verify these people because the traditional data sources don't exist, you just don't know where to go? So as folks are answering this, why when Kosmos and Enformion decided a partner is, we would like to be the engine behind the safe and secure self-sovereign movement, right? The idea that people own their data, but they still have to trade information about themselves. If you are going to buy an age restricted product that requires you to be 21 years old or older, Enformion would like to be there to confirm authoritatively that person is 21 years older, and to work with 1Kosmos to support that.

So as these questions are filtering out and the responses come in, I believe we will be able to show the results here. We'll close the poll and my colleagues should be able to share what their responses are. Here we go. So in terms of responses for the biggest area of concerns, lack of data, and maybe we add a little selection bias, that's why folks join this webinar, to understand what data options are available. But about 56% tell us lack of data on these populations are the major area of concern. All right, let's take a look at our next polling question. Yes. Let's see here. What is the largest areas of opportunity? And Mike, these have to do with what you mentioned before. It's profitable to go into these populations, right? 40 million, 45 million adults are all out there earning.

We know historically unemployment's really low right now, so they're earning and they have disposable income. So one is capturing lifetime value. The other is, if there's a product that is regionally bound and they want to expand and be a national brand or you want to move into new demographic sectors, being able to reach out to market and convert these populations is really important. There may be new products or services that are trying to be lent out to these spaces or there may be some regulatory requirements. Mike, what other trends do we see that might be pushing folks to want to reach out to these populations?

Mike Engle:
Well, specific to, say for example, telco operators, one of the first things that you'll do when you come to a country is get a phone. You'll figure out a way, the whole world's connected. You want to get a job, you need a phone. And so the phone companies see this as, let's be the one to get that phone, because I don't know about you, but I've had the same carrier and phone number forever. It's very uncommon to switch. You have to really have bad service to switch, or maybe you get uncarriered away by some really cheap thing. I see the phone market as a key indicator, and in the US we have programs that make getting a phone easy or easier for people of low income. There's a couple of government subsidy programs that if you meet certain income requirements, you can do that.

So that's a really hot area. I would say it's the banking and lending, those types of industries want to participate as well, but they're potentially putting more on the line themselves. To get a cell phone you have to pay for it, but to get a loan now the bank's taking risk. So they're a little more careful and pragmatic about it.

Garient Evans:
Thank you for that, Mike. And we probably have time now to close out the polling question and we'll have the results here pop up. And pretty even distribution, but in the lead here, expansion into new demographic sectors. So the marketers and the expansion folks on the call have this imperative to find these populations and to be able to make sure that there's the product and market fit and to verify them and onboard them is a big reason that these populations matter. Mike, before we go off this slide here, I know that Kosmos serves government agencies and entities and it's an important market for you all. What is their interest in being able to verify folks who may not be in the traditional credit world?

Mike Engle:
Well, if they're participating in this country, they will have benefits eventually, right? They're going to get a job, pay taxes, participate in social programs that we have. So they need to verify the identity. And there's some guidelines I mentioned NIST 363-3, the federal identity standard that says, here's how you give access to somebody and proof who they are remotely, needs to address everybody. So it can be really hard to prove who you are. And you hear horror stories about people trying literally for days and weeks to get access to their COVID payments, for example, because they couldn't prove who they are. So they have money, they need to give it to people, or there's a disaster and now you have millions flowing out to an area and you give a check to somebody, first of all, you don't know who to give it to and you can't prove it's them.

You can see how that's just really a terrible problem. The government needs to do what they do, they can't because they can't prove it, and then the recipient can't prove it as well. So it's a double-edged sword that everybody wants to solve, to just do what their job is.

Garient Evans:
And it's safe to say current processes are full of friction. It shouldn't be that hard to give access to benefits or relief that somebody's entitled to just because it's hard to verify them.

Mike Engle:
That's right.

Garient Evans:
Let's push out this polling question. How well is your current service provider helping you to reach be underserved? And we go from, yep, we're great, to no, we need a lot of help. We'll push this out. And Mike, being conscious of time here, I want to set you up because we're going to start talking a little bit more about 1Kosmos and what it does and how it operates. We've got a chance here to also do a bit of a demo. So if you don't mind, share just some of the core technology that 1Kosmos has developed, and that should help us wrap up this polling question.

Mike Engle:
I'd love to. I believe we'll be showing just a quick demo of a digital onboarding. Unfortunately in this country we don't have a reliable source of a digital certificate. In other countries they put a chip in the driver's license, and you can use that to as I have this thing and it's cryptographically verified. None of our driver's licenses here have that. Our passports do, but how many people have passports or the ability to read them? So what we do is the next best thing, which is use the billions of devices we have, to capture the data from government issued credentials. This is one of the primary ways that serves a majority of people. Majority of people do have documentation. So we scan the front, scan the back, grab the picture, match it to your live selfie, and do all kinds of security checks on that. Look for deep fakes.

Check it with the issuing DMV, AAMVA, and then if it passes that, you can have a much higher level of assurance that the person is who they say they are. So we'll run through a demo of that here just a minute and talk about that. And the legacy way of doing it is just ask people to type in some data and hope, they call it knowledge-based authentication. What street did you live on when you were six? What was your mother's shoe size when you were 12? Right? Those types of things. And of course we'll talk about some of the challenges of them as well.

Garient Evans:
We're going to go ahead and close out the polling question and we'll take a look at the results here. And feels like the majority well over half tell us the coverage is not good enough, and there are large gaps with their current providers in being able to access these populations. Again, a little bit of selection bias in who our audience is, given that they're here learning for what options are available to them. So without further ado, let's jump in here. Why don't you walk us through, I think we've got the next two or three slides, Mike, that'll help explain what 1Kosmos does.

Mike Engle:
This is traditional, been done for 30 years online way that is still unfortunately the primary way that financial institutions here in the US open up accounts. Type in your data, your social, your address, your name, date of birth, and they'll use fraud signals and stuff to try to prevent bad actors. But unfortunately those bad actors have access to all of this data. It's been stolen, lost so many times that it's almost useless. And often, many times, these issuing organizations will check the data against one source of truth, say one of the three bureaus. And that's a big challenge as well, because there's disparity in how those bureaus store and use data and report on it. I'm sure you can give a lot of detail about that. So if you go to the next slide, there's a new combination of tools we can do.

I mentioned, I kind of gave this away a little bit, ID proofing, which is scanning government credentials. Obviously you read them if you can, reading is better than scanning. Reading means you're digitally verifying, but we'll use the optical capability, the 12 megapixel camera that even cheap phones have today and verify it and match your selfie. But just as important as doing that and saying that driver's license looks good. I see the data, it doesn't look fraud to me, is checking it against something like an Enformion database, validate the first name, last name, address, date of birth, matches these sources of truth against multiple sources. So that's the ID verification part. And when you put these together, your level of assurance goes kind of one plus one equals three, and you get a much better signal that this is really the person that they claim to be.

Garient Evans:
Mike, I have to agree with you there. And just the why Enformion, we don't think one data source is enough, that's why we've over the last 30 years compiled approximately 6,000 different data sources. And those include the traditional data sources that we've been talking about, but also non-traditional, such as payday loans and places that these populations who don't have traditional financial relationships, they're going and using the services. Providers like telco, telco providers in the US, it's almost ubiquitous coverage. Almost every individual has a prepaid or postpaid phone. And so those are the different data sources that we incorporate into these checks. And so Mike, I think we're ready to see the next slide here.

Mike Engle:
Yeah, exactly. So let's build this out. So most people will have an email and a phone number, just back that up for a second for me. An email or phone number. Right? It's kind of the lowest common denominator for doing something remotely, digitally, because how do you reach out to somebody and let them use a system? So lots of ways to do that. And there's lots of ways to verify, is this a good phone number, has it been sim swapped recently? What's the tenure of the sim? And is this email in a bad actor database? As an example. So then there's all these other technologies. We mentioned Touch ID or a, I mentioned the FIDO Alliance, which is the passwordless standard. If you hit next. This is just enabling a biometric to link it to your identity. It's real simple. We all do this every day on our phones, and it's a local authenticator that lets you do something in a safe way.

Now just moving forward. Now, if you have a national identity number, an SSN, an ITIN, et cetera, and this varies country by country, that is one source of truth that unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the bureaus typically use as their starting point to say, who are you? And so it's an important part of a process to have in your tool belt. But when you do this, it is important to make sure you check all of the bureaus and also have the ability to verify address or our phone number data without having that SSN, right? So it's part of a tool that can't be required for you to have as broad of a solution as you can. Now you have these things and you start to onboard government credentials. So this is turning your analog license into a digital credential, where the system guide you through, hold your phone, scan the front, scan the back, verify all the security features, extract the data, and then you can match.

If you hit next, one more time, the user's live selfie to the image on the issued credential. So in order to do this right, you need biometrics that are done right, that are privacy preserving, that are resistant to deepfakes and spoofing and so forth. Tom Cruise with the mask over the head, the rubber mask. And one of the certifying bodies we go through is iBeta, we'll certify the product. There's NIST, FRVT, facial recognition vendor testing. So very important things that has to be done right. But that with a high level of assurance will match the photo on the driver's license. And you'll check to make sure there's no scotch tape on it or it's a printout or a computer screen. So next step would be to extract, verify, check it with the issuing authorities. So an example would be you can check the driver's license number against AAMVA.

If you press next one more time. You'll verify against the bureaus, against AAMVA, and just again, get a high level of trust that this is not only a valid credential, but it's in possession of the person that I just looked at with the camera. And you can do this omnichannel in a browser, in a browser to phone, only in a phone, et cetera. And that's part of the diversity, equity, inclusion as well, is being able to support as many devices as you can and even have a path for somebody who doesn't have a device, as rare as those are. Thanks for letting me show that.

Garient Evans:
We're not showing something that's future case, that's often the distance. This is here and now. And the government is reviewing these approaches and basically certifying the way that it should be done. What are some of the standards that we're hearing about to do this safely and securely for folks?

Mike Engle:
There's a couple key ones. I mentioned NIST 363-3. So they set the standards on how you scan documents and then match the selfie. And then there's a couple sections of the standard. There's one called the 63A, which is the identity assurance, I'm pretty sure this is Mike Engel. And then there's the section B, which is the authentication. How do you use that credential properly? And the gold standard is IAL level two. So it's like two really good or strong forms of identity matched with the face. And AAL2, which is multi-factor authentication. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. So NIST 363-3, it's going to version four soon, it's in draft, it's out for comment. And then the certifying body for that is called Kantara, the Kantara Initiative. It's a nonprofit.

So they test the vendors to make sure that they do those things to the right level. And then on the authentication side, you have NIST 363B, like I mentioned, and FIDO authentication is a standard by the FIDO Alliance, and products need to be tested against FIDO certification as well. And the biometric certifying bodies, there's a couple, but one of the popular ones that we use is called iBeta. So they're an independent testing lab that will test your facial recognition technology against all kinds of different scenarios for failure, false recognition, false acceptance, et cetera.

Garient Evans:
So Mike, there really is no excuse. We've just shown our audience, there's a path forward and those that are concerned about the safety, the security, whether or not these methodologies are approved, there's a set of standards and a set of tests against those standards. So we've shown there's a path forward. Let's set up the next polling question. And then we had promised our audience a chance to do some Q&A. So this question is, what will happen with regulations? We think no change, they'll stay the same. We think regulations will get enacted to make it easier to serve these populations, or maybe regulations will get in the way intuitively. Some privacy regulations have made it a bit more challenging to collect or use data, for example, I think we see in Illinois some biometric legislation and some enforcement actions that have had people pause as they think about using this technology. What are your perspectives there, Mike?

Mike Engle:
We will talk about biometrics in a second here as we talk about the future of identity, because you have to have biometrics, right? So what Illinois's done with BIPA, the biometric regulations they passed is, they had good intentions, but it's letting everybody run out and sue everybody. So people are afraid of abusing them now. And at the federal level there's been some issues with lack of disclosure on how biometrics have been used with certain agencies. So you have to do it right. People have to understand and trust what you're doing. As I mentioned in the beginning, you need the privacy by design and take a person-centric approach to these technologies.

Garient Evans:
That's great, Mike. Thank you. Let's go ahead and close the poll and see some results. All right, we got a pessimistic audience. We think that some of these regulations may present some challenges before they actually help. Some folks think no change, but 42% tell us, yeah, they're worried that these regulations are going to get in the way. So let's look in the crystal ball. What do we think is the future here for identity verification? Mike, what is 1Kosmos betting on?

Mike Engle:
Well, we see a bright future. When we started in 2018, identity was not at the forefront of people's conversation. But we see global organizations putting identity at the center of their zero trust or their, think about identity as an enabler, if you make it easy to consume and prove who you are, it makes it easier for your employees to log in, your customers to verify who they are. I'll tell you, Amazon has set the standard. You press a button, a product shows up in four hours. Imagine if you just go to any website and say, yeah, it's me. Press a button and you order that sweater at the holidays. So we're getting there. Things like FIDO passkey, which is a way for you to have your credential be used on all your devices easily, is helping. So I see passkeys becoming one of the future enabling technologies in the consumer world, and it'll make its way into enterprise.

And biometrics, you mentioned that there's a little bit of a negative feel when somebody pops up and says, I want to scan your face. But if you think about it, if you've walked down any major city, you're on camera 400 times a day. Every street corner's got your face. What are they doing with it? We're on Instagram, my image has been recorded 20,000 times here in the last 40 minutes. I think people are getting more comfortable with it. It's a matter of the privacy policies and then the laws to enforce them, that will start to mature as well.

Garient Evans:
Mike, we feel the same way. I think as consumers we've gotten used to, as a matter of fact we now expect rapid, easy service. We expect to be able to sign up for a product or service as easily as it is to download an app and to quickly get enabled with that product or service. And we expect to be able to interact with that provider safely, easily, and securely. Enformion has a role to play there. We think our visibility into things like phone numbers and who owns that phone number? Who has access to that phone number? Has that phone number been taken over through sim swap or port? We have a role to play to make sure that consumers can get verified, that they can interact with those providers safely and securely, and that fraudsters who are paying attention and adapting, that we adapt just ahead of them.

So with that said, we're going to take a look at some of the questions that have come in. We had one that came in, and Mike, the question was, how large do you think the non-citizen or foreigners coming into the US make up the thin-file and no-hit populations? And I'll share that immigration in the US continues, legal immigration to the US continues. And in particular the student populations are a big area where you have non-citizens participating, living here legally and having difficulty getting access to products and services. What perspective do you have there, Mike?

Mike Engle:
Well, the number, if I ask all the GPTs out there, they'll probably say it's big, but we don't know. But based on the numbers we showed earlier, it must be significant, millions. There's a lot of immigrants coming into this country. For better for worse, America was built on immigrants. So we'll say it's for better. So serving them, one of the challenges, even if somebody comes and they say, I'm from Guatemala and I'm here to work. They may not have credit history in Guatemala either. And if they did, that it would transfer over here. They're not compatible formats. So you really need to start from scratch here in many times, many occurrences. I've seen a number of private companies that have popped up to serve these populations, and I just saw one in the news this week. It was a partnership between BNY Mellon and MoCaFi. So it's M-O-C-A-F-I. Really cool idea.

They're specifically helping to serve that underserved demographics and creating financial instruments that's easier for them to get. So, hey, you fit into this category, we're going to work with you. You mentioned payroll. In other countries, there's been an explosion of people that let your history of taking a loan on your payroll, which can be a sleazy business if not done right. But if you do it right and you give them like just couple points of interest that they pay, but they prove that they can pay it back over and over, if that got fed back to the credit bureaus, simply by working for six months, you'll have taken loans and paid them back, taken loans, paid them back consistently, and showing that you're worthy of them maybe issuing you a financial product.

So these companies exist today, and I think we're going to see a lot more of them getting built into the ecosystem and being offered to people, like-

Garient Evans:
I echo your sentiments there. I'm an immigrant to this country. I came here, I was born outside the US and I saw my family struggle to get access to products and services. So this topic is personal to me, but I can say I have some spending power and companies would love to do business with me and my immigrant family. And so I'm delighted to see that there's innovations, there's tools and technology to be able to serve the underserved. Mike, we're right here on time. If there are additional questions that come in, we will answer them. We're going to blast out questions and answers to our audience along with a recording of today's discussion. Mike, I'm really thrilled to have 1Kosmos as a partner and you joining this webinar. Any final words that you want to share with our audience as we wrap up?

Mike Engle:
There's a lot of ways to plug in. If this is a hot topic for you, there's working groups all over the industry. You can find one that fits your interests. I just encourage people to get plugged in and see if they can make a difference by contributing to even just how you call these things. The taxonomy of the attributes of an underserved population is it's hard to get that stuff right. So there's lots of things for people to do.

Garient Evans:
Yeah, you're right. The country I was born in, you have to physically go down, stand in a long queue and try and, if you're not bribing local officials, you're trying to get access to products and services. There are more ways, more convenient ways to do it now than ever before. And so thank you to our audience for joining us today. Enformion and 1Kosmos are appreciative of your time, and we look forward to following up with you after this webinar. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate your time.

Mike Engle:
It was great meeting.

Garient Evans:
All right.

Mike Engle:
Thank you.

Garient Evans:
Thank you all. Take care.