The Enterprise Identity Shift: Building Resilience Across Fraud, Compliance, and Customer Experience

This IDC Perspective discusses how identity verification has become the control point for modernization and resilience in financial services. It now enables fraud prevention, regulatory assurance, customer trust, and secure cloud adoption. Generative AI has expanded both risks and defensive capabilities, requiring institutions to adopt multi-signal approaches that combine document verification, liveness detection, behavioral analytics, device intelligence, and third-party data.Effective programs link identity verification to business outcomes through defined ownership across fraud, compliance, IT, and operations. When integrated into the three lines of defense, identity becomes proactive rather than reactive, improving auditability, reducing operational friction, and strengthening transparency. Institutions that orchestrate core and contextual signals through unified governance transform identity verification from a control function into a strategic enabler of trust, modernization, and data-driven innovation."Identity is no longer a checkpoint in financial services; it is the infrastructure of trust." - Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Compliance, and Financial Crime