Beyond Passwords and OTPs: How Network APIs Are Reshaping Digital Identity Verification

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The Fast Mode Podcasts: Breaking News, Analysis and Updates From Telecoms Industry 31 min 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 1 month ago
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How is online identity fraud evolving and why are traditional passwords and OTPs no longer enough?

Tara Neal 0:11
Welcome to the FastMode studios. I'm Tara Neel, and with me today is Massara Muhammad, Senior Research Analyst, Communications Platform as a Service, CPaaS at IDC, and Kunal Shukla, SVP and GM, Head of Networks API at OneEdge. IDC is a leading global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the IT, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. Masara leads IDC's global CPaaS research and advisory practice, shaping the firm's perspective on API-driven communications, customer engagement platforms and their convergence with contact centre and UCNC ecosystems. One Age, a part of Ericsson, creates technology that empowers enterprises and equips developers to lead in the next era of digital transformation.
Tara Neal 1:07
At One Age, Kunal is responsible for accelerating global growth and market leadership for the company's network-powered solutions, delivering secure, mobile-first and AI-driven digital user experiences and outcomes for enterprises and developers. Masara and Kunal join us today to discuss how digital identity fraud is evolving, why traditional authentication methods are falling short, and how network APIs can help create more secure, trusted, and scalable identity verification across the digital ecosystem. Welcome, guys. Great to have both of you on today's episode. Thank you, Tara, for having us.
Kunal Shukla 1:51
Thank you, Tara, for having us.
Tara Neal 1:52
Awesome. Okay. So, you know, we are going to dissect, you know, this very interesting topic. And I'm going to begin with my question to Masara. So how is online identity fraud evolving? And why is the bigger issue becoming not the attackers, but the cyber defences tasked at hand?
Masarra Mohamed 2:15
Thank you so much, Tara. Okay, so online identity fraud is evolving in three main ways, if I can like cluster them. Firstly, it is becoming more automated and scalable. So fraud is no longer only about an individual attacker stealing a password or intercepting an OTP. So we're now seeing a much more industrialized fraud environment. So attackers can use automation, breach data, synthetic identity, social engineering, and more and more increasingly, even AI generated content to test and manipulate identity signals at scale, you know. And secondly, it's because fraud is becoming more convincing. So attackers are not always trying to look suspicious. They are trying to look more legitimate, if I can say.
Masarra Mohamed 3:10
They... You know, they might have the correct password, access to personal information or enough behavioral context to pass the traditional checks. So it's like it makes it statistic identity methods that we usually have, such as, you know, the password and OTP and knowledge based verification much more less effective on their own right now. And thirdly, is because the customer journey within itself, it becomes, it became a lot more fragmented these days. So consumer are interacting with banks, retails, healthcare provider, public sector, and digital platforms across so many channels and devices. So every like login, account recovery, payments approval, password reset, or like the customer service interactions we have, they become a potential point of fraud or potential point of risk.
Masarra Mohamed 4:11
So the bigger challenges that we have, it's not just the attackers you mentioned, it is that many cyber defense model were designed for a different era. much more different era than the agentic era. It's built around a one-time verification. So prove who you are at the start of the journey and then continue.

What are the three main ways that digital‑identity fraud is becoming more automated, convincing, and fragmented?

Masarra Mohamed 4:34
So it is just one point verifications for the users and then ultimately you can access all these different channels and pathways. Fraud today, however, is continuous, adaptive and cross-channel. It means that defense also needs to be autonomous, contextual and risk-based. So this is where network-based identity signals become much more important. And who has access to that is telcos. So telcos right now have real-time access to this intelligence that most enterprises do not have that kind of access. They have whether a mobile number is generally associated with a device.

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