Identity Verification: Enhancing the Customer Journey

In today’s digital-first world, digital identity verification plays a pivotal role in securing and verifying everything — from onboarding new accounts to facilitating payments and other critical transactions. However, traditional methods of digital identity verification often pose significant challenges — including prolonged processing times, increased fraud risks, and frustrating customer experiences. These issues result in higher abandonment rates, greater exposure to fraud, and lower overall customer satisfaction.

Equifax addresses these challenges with its industry-leading data-driven identity verification solution: Equifax Digital Identity and Trust. In this blog, we provide a high-level overview of the solution. To learn more about how it works and the results we've had with Equifax customers, check out our whitepaper.

Overview of Equifax Digital Identity and Trust

Digital Identity and Trust (DIT) is one of the industry’s leading identity solutions. It leverages cutting-edge AI/ML models, updated data sources, and risk signals to adapt to emerging business needs. Here’s what makes our solution unique and effective.

1. More PII data elements

Traditional identity verification relies primarily on physical identifiers such as addresses and Social Security Numbers (SSNs). The DIT product goes beyond these static data points by incorporating dynamic digital identifiers, including email addresses, mobile phone numbers, device IDs, and IP addresses. A considerable number of organizations face limitations in their ability to access and analyze IP and email data, where both of them are critical factors for accurate identity verification. By maximizing the use of diverse PII elements, Equifax DIT enhances verification accuracy and strengthens decision-making processes.

2. Enhanced population coverage

Effective identity verification requires broad coverage across diverse populations. With differentiated, multisource data, Equifax DIT routinely achieves population coverage rates greater than 98%, ensuring high verification success across most customer transactions. Comprehensive customer analyses and reference data hits further validate this performance, ensuring businesses can securely verify nearly all potential customers.

3. Strong coverage for younger populations

Verifying young or underbanked populations — particularly individuals aged 18 to 26 — has historically been challenging due to limited credit or banking histories.

Equifax DIT addresses this gap by leveraging multisource data to improve coverage rates in this age group. Compared to legacy identity verification products, DIT on average passes 50% more transactions for younger populations, providing businesses with a competitive advantage in reaching this critical demographic segment.

4. Advanced identity graph for PII linkage

The Equifax DIT identity graph establishes meaningful relationships between both traditional and digital identity elements, creating a comprehensive and cohesive identity profile. Traditional PII data elements, such as driver’s licenses, passports, and utility bills are seamlessly linked to digital identifiers like email addresses, phone numbers, geolocation data, and device IDs.

5. High performance

Equifax DIT consistently outperforms other solutions, passing 20% more transactions while reviewing fewer accounts — all with comparable risk exposure. Recent customer use case studies demonstrate identity trust rates ranging from the low to mid-90% range. An impact and fraud analysis revealed DIT drove a 38% reduction in charge-offs while maintaining similar net margins on quality bookings.

Learn More About Equifax Digital Identity and Trust

Read more about our Digital Identity and Trust solution in our white paper — which highlights how its capabilities can be customized to meet a variety of business challenges.