Outgoing Onfido CEO Sees Bright Future for Digital Identity, Biometrics

Outgoing Onfido CEO Husayn Kassai has shared some thoughts on the progression of the digital identity industry in a farewell post on the company blog. In it, he predicted that digital identity will have a transformative impact on the economy in the next few years, noting that digital identity will help reduce fraud while boosting financial inclusion for people all over the world.

In that regard, Kassai argued that digital identity represents a new economic and political standard, insofar as digital identity is able to deliver better convenience while still offering high levels of privacy and security. As a result, the technology offers a compelling solution to some of the more pressing economic challenges of the moment. For example, approximately half of the world’s population is still unbanked or underbanked, which means that they do not have a credit file and are consequently unable to participate in the digital economy in any way.

Digital identity technologies – including biometric technologies like facial recognition – will make it easier to verify the identities of people who are not well represented in contemporary economic systems. That’s why Gartner predicts that 80 percent of companies will integrate document-centric identity proofing into their onboarding practices by 2022, a figure that is a major step up from the comparable 30 percent figure in 2020.

There is also a demand for identity proofing solutions that can help address financial crime. Kassai indicated that roughly five percent of the world’s GDP is laundered money, and that less than one percent of that money is ever reclaimed by international authorities.

Kassai announced that he would be stepping down last week, but confirmed that he would stay with the company he co-founded in an advisory capacity. Mike Tuchen will be taking over as Onfido moves toward an IPO.

In the meantime, Onfido will be retraining its algorithm in an effort to eliminate racial bias. Kassai himself was recently named as London’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

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November 16, 2020 – by Eric Weiss