Magic Quadrant for Identity Verification

Identity Verification Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

Key features and pros and cons of top Identity Verification products:

1Kosmos - Niche Player

Pros:

Its IDV solution is tightly integrated with its digital identity wallet, which is widely deployed in both workforce and customer use cases. Its digital identity wallet offering is highly mature.
It offers significant discounts for customers signing multiyear deals. As a result, it had a much higher than average number of customers who signed multiyear deals during 2023.
The option to bundle provides additional features beyond IDV, including digital identity wallet and passwordless authentication solutions. Bundling makes it an effective solution for workforce use cases, such as onboarding and account recovery.

Cons:

When carrying out optical character recognition (OCR) on identity documents, it is currently limited to supporting Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic character sets only. As a result, its IDV solution may not be suitable for organizations needing support for more diverse character sets.
Its IDV product roadmap is not a point of differentiation. Several features implemented in 2023 and cited by 1Kosmos as being the most effective, such as those relating to document coverage and configurable data retention, are playing catch-up with the market. The same applies to several features expected in the coming 18 months.
Its credible value proposition and differentiation stem from the coupling of IDV with its digital identity wallet and passwordless authentication capabilities. The value proposition for using 1Kosmos for IDV alone is somewhat diminished without these complementary capabilities.

AU10TIX - Visionary

Pros:

It had an exceptionally low customer churn rate despite macroeconomic factors such as reduced venture capital funding and volatility in cryptocurrency markets affecting fintech firms and leading to churn elsewhere in the IDV market.
Its customer base has a diverse geographic spread. It also has a highly diverse list of top document types processed in 2023, and it supports a wide range of character sets and languages for document OCR.
It has a high level of accessibility, as evidenced by its voluntary product accessibility template (VPAT) and the accessibility features woven into its design and development processes. These features position it well in a market in which accessibility is increasingly important, and in some cases, a regulatory obligation.

Cons:

It was unable to provide granular insights into user experience (UX) metrics, such as the number of image retakes that were due to poor quality. It may, therefore, lack sufficient data to address UX issues, should they arise.
It had few examples of features that are industry-specific, and it was ineffective at demonstrating how its sales and marketing teams are structured to address different industry requirements.
It does not have in-depth practices for assessing customer satisfaction (meaning the satisfaction of organizations contracting with them for IDV services), evaluating the maturity of customers' IDV processes or helping customers increase that maturity.

Entrust - Leader

Pros:

Its Studio no-code visual workflow editor easily allows customers to drag and drop 'tasks' within the IDV journey and apply conditional logic to the outputs of those tasks. The interface is intuitive and enables users to create a single, flexible IDV journey definition.
It has a very structured approach to researching the IDV market. In particular, it stands out for having a mature competitive intelligence function. It shows great candor and self-awareness in acknowledging factors that influence both positive and negative prospect decisions.
Customers surveyed for this Magic Quadrant gave it a high score for customer satisfaction. It provides granular data on how it measures customer satisfaction and how this has changed over time. It can candidly identify areas for continual improvement of customer satisfaction.

Cons:

The percentage of its IDV checks requiring a final decision from a human to drive up pass rates is high — even considering some markets' regulatory requirements for human involvement. In some cases, human involvement addresses shortcomings in its automated processing. For example, it does not offer full automation of OCR in non-Latin character sets. This high use of human involvement drives up average processing time.
The pricing is higher for a global spread of documents than for U.S. documents only. This variance is unusual, and is likely due to its reliance on human involvement for document types it sees less often and with non-Latin character sets.
Its discount offers for customers signing multiyear deals are low, which likely contributed to the low rate of customers signing multiyear deals in 2023.

GB Group - Niche Player

Pros:

It has a high level of connectivity to data sources to obtain additional signals about identity claims. Many of these come via integration with ID3Global. In addition, its GBG Trust product is an identity graph solution that can correlate signals from the IDV solution. This architecture is driven by a focus predominantly on compliance and onboarding use cases.
The IDV solution is part of the identity division within the larger GB Group and is, thus, highly viable. Although it does not generate high revenue specifically from IDV, it has a large number of customers using its IDV solution. In addition, it had a high renewal rate in 2023.
It offers quality image capture and verification, which reflects rigor in document capture and face matching. Notably it provides a credible, detailed explanation regarding its process for training and evaluating the machine learning (ML) models used for document assessment.

Cons:

It is more expensive for processing IDV events in scenarios involving different volumes of only U.S. documents and scenarios involving a global spread of documents.
Customers gave it a low score in overall customer satisfaction. It scored lowest in areas such as ease of administration for operational tasks, ability to detect fraudulent identity presentations, UX and conversion rate, and pace of innovation.
Its VPAT showed that people with disabilities would find it hard or impossible to use the IDV solution, automated accessibility checks yielded poor results, and its SDK does not support assistive technology (e.g., voice assistance for users with impaired vision). These findings may be a concern as accessibility becomes an increasingly important requirement, and in some markets, a regulatory obligation.

Incode Technologies - Leader

Pros:

Its solution is easy to configure, with a clean and intuitive interface. This usability is largely driven by its Workflows no-code IDV journey editor, which allows users to drag and drop components of the IDV process and use conditional logic to control the user journey and potential step-up fraud checks.
It offers a novel pricing model, with SLAs linked to conversion rate and fraud outcomes. Failure to meet the SLAs results in heavy discounts. This strategy is a potentially disruptive alternative to the standard per-verification pricing, which is decoupled from performance outcomes.
Its product roadmap balances enhancements to core aspects (such as deepfake detection) with the addition of new features for workforce use cases. Its roadmap is also rich with features that complement its core IDV solution. Recently released features include a reusable digital identity product and an age-estimation tool that has been highly ranked by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Cons:

It relies solely on a biannual Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to assess customer satisfaction and did not provide the latest results. This approach neglects common metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, customer effort scores (CES) and time-to-resolution for support tickets.
It had a high customer churn rate in 2023, which it attributes to macroeconomic factors related to customers in the fintech and cryptocurrency spaces missing growth targets or going out of business.
It has below-average marketing execution, with a tendency to rely on promoting its AI and ML capabilities. However, as every vendor does this, focusing on AI and ML has become white noise in the market.

Jumio - Leader

Pros:

It can clearly articulate how its acquisitions have enhanced its IDV business and how market disruptors — such as government eID schemes, portable digital identity and the convergence of IDV with cybersecurity — will impact it.
It has a clear sales methodology and shows strong alignment between the sales and product teams via an in-depth field enablement program. It has one of the most globally distributed direct sales teams, and it had a high deal-closing ratio in 2023.
It has a high level of accessibility, as evidenced by its VPAT and the accessibility features woven into its design and development processes. These features position it well in a market in which accessibility is increasingly important, and in some cases, a regulatory obligation.

Cons:

The percentage of its IDV checks requiring a final decision from a human to drive up pass rates is high — even considering some markets' regulatory requirements for human involvement. In some cases, human involvement addresses shortcomings in its automated processing, such as unsupported document types. This high use of human involvement drives up processing time.
The pricing is higher for a global spread of documents than for U.S. documents only. This variance is unusual, and is likely due to its reliance on human involvement for document types it sees less often.
Ease of configuration is low. While it does have a no-code visual workflow editor, it is part of Jumio's managed service, not customer-facing. This approach is out of step with the trend of empowering customers to build and manage their IDV journey workflows themselves.

Mitek Systems - Visionary

Pros:

It emphasizes innovation within the company culture. Examples include regular internal hackathon events, which are open to all employees and have been linked to over 30 new features released in the IDV solution.
It has a particularly structured customer onboarding program, which has distinct phases of support from contract signing until 30 days after go-live. It also has a multifaceted approach to assessing customer satisfaction across six clear dimensions.
It conducted a thorough analysis of its marketing activities in 2023 to inform its marketing approach for 2024. It also clearly articulated planned marketing campaigns, with a well-reasoned rationale for each.

Cons:

It is more expensive to process IDV events in scenarios involving different volumes of only U.S. documents and scenarios involving a global spread of documents.
It does not offer prebuilt integrations with customer relationship management, access management and IT service management platforms. It does not consider these to be included in the buying criteria for enterprise customers.
Its business focuses on North America and Europe, with very minor activity in Latin America and no direct or indirect sales presence in any other regions. It processed identity documents from a limited range of countries in 2023 and supports relatively few character sets and languages for OCR.

Persona - Challenger

Pros:

It offers strong fraud and risk controls, as well as native capabilities, such as location intelligence, device profiling and behavioral analysis, to provide contextual risk and trust signals. It also offers detailed insights via its Graph network feature and granular policy control, giving customers flexibility as to how they leverage the data.
Its prices are low, and it does not offer multiyear contracts because it wants clients to renew by choice each year. It makes a contractual commitment to not increase pricing at renewal time. In addition, it offers a permanent free tier (as opposed to a free trial) for low-volume customers with simple requirements.
It has a high level of accessibility, as evidenced by its VPAT and the accessibility features woven into its design and development processes. These features position it well in a market in which accessibility is increasingly important, and in some cases, a regulatory obligation.

Cons:

Its availability is below average; however, its uptime for 2023 was within its SLA. Its SaaS solution is hosted in Google Cloud Platform, and its uptime SLA was in line with the market average. The provided uptime data included legacy, shared tenancy deployments; however, new deployments can now be on more resilient single tenancy infrastructure.
It is North America-focused. Most of its customers are in the U.S., and it has no sales presence outside North America or Mexico. Its strategy for acquiring customers in other countries is nascent. However, it did process a reasonably diverse set of global identity documents in 2023.
It does not have a strategy to address the needs of customers in specific industries. Its sales and marketing efforts focus on use cases, and it aims to make its platform maximally configurable rather than develop industry-specific features.

Socure - Leader

Pros:

It offers strong fraud risk and controls. Its Digital Intelligence module gathers contextual signals related to location, device and user behavior. These data points can be assessed alone or checked against the SocureID identity graph, with the results then combined with the IDV check to reach an overall decision.
It serves a wide range of industries, and its sales and marketing structure has a vertical focus, with a range of product features tailored to different verticals, such as reverification of delivery drivers. It is close to achieving Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program certification to serve U.S. public-sector customers.
It has a flexible and data-driven approach to running proofs of concept with sales prospects. Its salespeople have a high closing rate, which it credits to a six-level training program for all teams selling IDV and an 'extreme focus' on deal qualification.

Cons:

Although it reports that about one-third of its customers are outside the U.S., almost all its processed documents are North American. It supports a wide range of character sets and languages for OCR, but it was unable to demonstrate actual experience in processing a diverse set of global identity documents at scale.
Its proprietary liveness detection capability has not been tested in conformance with ISO/IEC 30107-3 (international standard for testing biometric presentation and attack detection), and its proprietary biometric face-matching algorithms have not been submitted to the U.S. NIST for testing.
Its solution is fully automated. A case management system allows customers to provide their own agents, if needed, for exception handling. This approach may be an issue for customers in markets where review by a human agent is a regulatory requirement.

Sumsub - Leader

Pros:

It showed high diversity in the locations of its customer base and the top document types processed in 2023. It supports a wide range of character sets and languages for document OCR and offers out-of-the-box versions of its administrative portal in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. In addition, it has built a broad range of connections to authoritative government identity sources in different countries.
It has a strong vertical/industry strategy, with product features tailored to verticals such as gambling and cryptocurrency exchanges. In addition, its sales and marketing teams are strongly vertically aligned, with industry champions responsible for disseminating expertise.
In a survey of customer contacts, it scored high in overall customer satisfaction. It scored highest in areas such as ease of configuration, ease of administration, support in ensuring successful use of the solution, and pace of innovation.

Cons:

It has not submitted its proprietary face-matching algorithms to the U.S. NIST for testing, stating that it prefers to rely on its own benchmarking.
It delivered numerous IDV-specific features in 2023, but its stated roadmap for 2024 focuses more on IDV-adjacent features, such as AML and payment source verification, which lack relevance beyond compliance use cases. In addition, it failed to articulate a clear product strategy for portable digital identity.
While an automated accessibility check showed strong results, it declined to provide a VPAT, which would have yielded more detailed insights. This finding may be a concern as accessibility becomes an increasingly important requirement, and in some markets, a regulatory obligation.

ZOLOZ - Niche Player

Pros:

All of its customers are in APAC, with approximately half in China. Clients with a strong APAC focus may benefit from its expertise with APAC document types, regulation and — in particular — connectivity to authoritative government sources, such as the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.
For market responsiveness, it presented clear examples of how it had adapted its product to meet new regulatory environments in markets such as Hong Kong and the Philippines.
In a survey of customer contacts, it achieved an average score for overall customer satisfaction. It scored strongest in areas such as reliability and uptime, support in ensuring successful use of its IDV solution, and being a strong partner to support its customers' business growth.

Cons:

It declined to provide pricing scenario information.
It cited a relatively low conversion rate (the percentage of users successfully able to complete the IDV process), which may be a result of the fraud environment in some APAC markets. Customers are advised to review the ZOLOZ UX to ensure it meets their requirements.
It failed to provide a VPAT, and automated accessibility checks yielded poor results. This finding may be a concern as accessibility becomes an increasingly important requirement, and in some markets, a regulatory obligation.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

A: Entrust, Incode Technologies, Jumio, Socure, Sumsub

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders deliver a broad and comprehensive IDV product that addresses a wide range of use cases and customer needs. They have successfully built a significant installed customer base and revenue stream. Leaders demonstrate a superior vision that goes beyond simply doing more of the same at a larger scale. They also demonstrate strong execution to bring that vision to fruition. They anticipate IDV requirements and in some ways help shape the market.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Identity Verification in 2024

Identity Verification Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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