The rise of consumer-based digital identity in South Africa

Many companies in South Africa are digitising their customer onboarding. This became far more relevant in a post-Covid world where digital customer relationships are booming.

To do this, companies must undertake a complicated digital identity process to validate that an individual is who they say they are. There are numerous platforms in the local and international market offering this service. But how many of them are truly consumer-based?

Contactable anticipated the future requirement of enterprises in South Africa

Founded in 2009, Contactable anticipated the future requirement of enterprises in South Africa to access a comprehensive digital identity platform — one that would orchestrate and federate the workflows that allow consumers to conduct this process across all channels, creating a digital identity that mirrors their physical identity.

Digital identity as a concept was historically driven by enterprises trying to digitise their manual processes, but we are now seeing a shift towards consumer-based digital identity. There is an increasing trend towards identities that are self-managed, where the user approves access to their digital identity on a case-by-case basis. This is often called Bring-Your-Own-Identity, or "BYOI".

While one would think that government would be best positioned to facilitate BYOI platforms, government identities tend to be very jurisdictional. The digital channels of today are not.

The result is that governments worldwide have struggled to transition and overlap the virtual and physical world. Financial services providers have built systems with high trust, but these have fallen behind on customer experience and been fraught with friction.

Mobile network operators (MNOs)

Recent research indicates that mobile network operators (MNOs) have been the leaders in finding the balance between user experience and transaction assurance. In a post-Covid world, more industries have to build digital identity solutions for their onboarding and verification processes.

The key to finding the balance between user experience and transaction assurance is an orchestration platform — a digital identity platform that can automate all your internal workflows and risk-based assurance requirements while making the customer experience as frictionless as possible.

The largest digital identity orchestration platform in South Africa

The Contactable platform is the largest digital identity orchestration platform in South Africa. It is used extensively by corporate South Africa across the financial services, automotive, telco, insurance, retail and real estate sectors for digital onboarding, e-KYC, Self-RICA and identity-proofing requirements. The AI-driven platform completes around 200,000 KYCs every month, with more than 90% completed programmatically (i.e. self-KYC, with no client intervention) in under 90 seconds. The platform processes 25 to 30 million digital orchestration processes per month for operations requiring biometrics, data, onboarding, workflows, identity verification and system integrations.

Your identity is going digital — it's inevitable

Our goal at Contactable is to help our clients onboard their customers' identities in a consistent, frictionless process. Our orchestration platform automates the workflow decisioning, integrates seamlessly with third-party providers and puts our clients in control of their workflows.

The Contactable platform is convenient, accurate and fast — put us to the test.