Press release announced by Women in Identity
ID Exclusion is bad for business!
Women in Identity is committed to diversity and inclusion because they believe the best identity products are created by all for all. Building on their research about the human impact of identity exclusion research, Women in Identity commissioned Professor Edgar Whitley at the London School of Economics to undertake research to better understand the business impact of identity exclusion.
Women in Identity is an international non-profit run primarily by volunteers. There are nearly 1 billion people who cannot prove their identity, and over 3 billion people worldwide without a digital identity. Women in Identity’s mission is to drive the digital identity industry to build solutions with diverse teams to promote universal access, which enables civic, social, and economic empowerment around the world. They do that through thought-leadership, education, best practices, and research. Their current programme of research is the ID Code of Conduct. Women in Identity strongly believe there is a need for a global Identity Code of Conduct to address identity exclusion—being excluded from access to identification credentials — subsequently leading to exclusion from financial services and products.
Their latest research, which launches on 12 June – sign up for the launch webinar here – demonstrates that even organisations that aspire to be identity inclusive lack the understanding of the hidden costs and opportunity cost of not building identity inclusion into their design phase for new services and re-design of existing services. It’s clear that it costs more to be on the unhappy path for identity verification, still, some companies lack awareness of what it costs them and what tasks are required to build in inclusion-by-design.
Their new report aims to help companies and governments identify their costs and design with inclusion in mind. And highlights the economic benefits of taking an identity inclusion by default approach.
Two key takeaways from the research are:
1. Widen the happy path for customers by being inclusive from the concept design phase.
2. Understand the tasks, monitored costs and hidden costs associated with supporting customers on the unhappy path.
Loss of customers and increased profits are the opportunity cost of identity exclusion. The research found that by widening the happy
