Robust customer identity verification and authentication capabilities are essential for delivering a smooth customer experience, from onboarding to transacting, while ensuring security and protection from fraud. Regulatory and competitive pressures demand that financial institutions review their existing approaches and invest accordingly now.

This report is a primer on identity and authentication. It discusses key trends and developments in end user identities, provides an overview of what Celent views as key capabilities in identity verification and authentication today, and highlights example vendors with offerings in this space.

The identity verification and authentication vendor landscape is diverse, fragmented, and complex; the figure below includes over 70 names in the greyed out areas. The list of vendors is by no means exhaustive, and there is no doubt that we left out many names worthy of inclusion. The listing of any vendor in this chart does not indicate our endorsement, just like an omission does not imply any judgment from us. Also, many players deserve to be listed in multiple if not most of the boxes. Wherever possible we tried to focus on the vendors’ distinctive capabilities based on our current understanding.

This also serves as a launchpad for a new category in VendorMatch, Celent’s digital service allowing vendors to list their solutions in various areas and be discovered by financial institution buyers. We invite vendors to publish their identity verification and authentication solutions on VendorMatch and look forward to engaging with them going forward.