I really don’t want to brag too much or seem too over the top but we have changed the world of identity authentication.  Really.  We did.

How? By launching ExpectID Enterprise, a brand new knowledge based authentication (KBA) product that solves many of the problems associated with those ridiculously frustrating and hard to remember shared secret questions we all know so well – What’s your mother’s maiden name?  What’s the name of your favorite pet? etc. etc.

You can read all the details of this new product in our press release announcement.  The cliff note version is that ExpectID Enterprise lets a bank create and present authentication questions to consumers using their own internal customer data without having to share any of that data with a third party.  The kicker is that the bank still gets all the advantages of using a Software as a Service solution to create, manage and monitor their custom questions.

I’ve often blogged about the dangers of shared secrets and the difference between static-KBA and dynamic-KBA. (See How Shared Secret Security Questions Are Killing Customer Service and How Dynamic KBA Could Have Stopped Palin’s Email from being Hacked).  Not only are shared secrets at a high risk of being socially engineered, consumers just plain don’t like them because they often forget the answers.  Think how much easier it is to answer a multiple choice question like “How much is your biweekly deposit?” when registering for an online bank account, than it is to rack your brain trying to remember what answer you used several months (or years) ago, how it was spelled and if there were any capital letters or numbers involved.

Businesses having the capability to use their own data as a source for questions sounds simple, but really it’s quite complex.  There are a lot of moving parts and analytics associated with identity security questions, which is where the expertise of IDology comes in.  This is our business.  We understand the nuances related to identity, fraud and dynamic KBA sessions.  Now banks, healthcare providers, retailers and essentially anyone using shared secret questions can take advantage of the powerful capabilities of a dynamic KBA solution but using data that is more relevant to their business; and without impacting the data privacy of their customers.