Remember the wise words of Charles Darwin? "It's not the strongest of the species that survives," he declared, "nor the most intelligent [...] – it is the one that is most adaptable to change." This rings especially true in today's financial services landscape, where digital disruption is no longer a whisper on the wind, but a full-blown hurricane tearing through legacy systems and traditional business models. Digital-first providers, including challenger banks, neobanks, fintechs, insurtechs and most recently, techfins, have morphed into formidable competitors, delivering seamless, personalized experiences that leave many incumbents gasping for air. And it comes as no surprise that digital identity in financial services underpins this very paradigm.

But as the rapid evolution of the financial services industry has shown throughout history, the most adaptable inherit the future. While the rise of digital-first providers across the industry presents undeniable challenges, so too it creates extensive opportunities for incumbent providers to raise their game, gain access to cutting-edge fintech/techfin innovation, and most importantly of all: deliver new streamlined, secure, and scalable experiences to their customers, while having them coming back for more.

This explains why the most progressive (and successful) financial institutions continue to increase their investments in converged identity and access management (IAM) to drive hyper-personalization, adaptive security, and business model expansion at scale.

Research shows that the top six challengers and neobanks accounted for approximately 24% of the global banking market in 2022, with CAGR of 28% through 2028. It’s therefore no surprise that 50% of the industry executives (70% in the banking segment) surveyed by PwC back in 2016 felt that fintechs, more broadly, posed a threat to the incumbents’ market share. While perceptions have shifted over the years, these very nimble challengers continue to pose a threat to incumbents on three levels:

• Customer Experience: They excel at streamlined, connected journeys, leaving clunky interfaces in the dust.

   

• Profitability: Their greenfield tech allows for lower-cost operations, squeezing margins for those stuck in the past.

   

• Trust: They identify and mitigate the risk of account takeover (ATO), unauthorized access, and fraud to protect customers’ identifiable information (PII).

But there’s always a flipside to all perceptions, and herein risk turns into opportunity – those digital challengers lack the incumbents’ brand recognition, licensing reach, and established infrastructure to go it alone; this is proving more difficult than some think. This explains why aspiring fintechs and techfins are, and will continue to be reliant on incumbents. They can't beat incumbents at their own game, but they can force them to evolve it. 

Many financial institutions are still reliant on home-grown and/or legacy IAM solutions to meet their authentication, identity verification (including know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML), and authorization needs). Not only does this inhibit their ability to respond to the threats alluded to above, but also puts them at a significant competitive disadvantage. And that’s largely down to the fact that these very challengers typically operate greenfield IAM implementation across the full breadth of customer identity (CIAM), workforce identity (WIAM), and partner (B2B2X) needs. 

Unsurprisingly, the most progressive providers in the industry are increasingly throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at the problem by extricating themselves from IAM legacy and a fragmented mosaic of point solutions that are both expensive to maintain and unable to future-proof IAM investments. This is precisely why, according to Gartner, 70% of all planned IAM investments are expected to be funneled into “converged” solutions that provide full coverage across most, if not all, identity needs and use cases. Put simply, converged IAM can meet the needs of all identity types, all identity deployment settings, and identity ecosystems across the financial services industry while driving a sustained return on investments. 

1. Modernize Your IAM Infrastructure 

Ditch the clunky legacy and unify point solutions into a single, scalable platform. Embrace extensibility with third-party biometrics, identity verification, and risk management technologies. Reach across complex authentication, authorization, identity verification, threat detection, and prevention use cases and deploy all self-managed, hybrid, or SaaS settings. 

The Ping Identity Platform is uniquely positioned to achieve this by giving you access to: 

• An industry-leading converged IAM platform providing comprehensive functionality across all customer identity, workforce identity, and B2B2X identity use cases. This will help you accelerate your IAM ROI, reduce time to value, and accelerate digital innovation.  
  
  

• Extensive identity verification, consent management and privacy, and real-time threat protection capabilities. These will help you eliminate identity theft, reduce fraud losses, and mitigate cybersecurity risks and data breaches while complying with regulatory requirements.
  
  

• Cutting-edge IAM innovation in areas such as decentralized identity, AI-driven threat detection/prevention, and adaptive access space. This will keep you at the cutting edge of IAM advancements and innovation and accelerate your fraud prevention, payments, and Open Banking investments.
  
  

• A comprehensive set of tools to smoothly manage the transition from IAM legacy and migrate to the cloud at your own pace. These will help you to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), hyperscale, accelerate your digital agility, and strengthen data security across all deployment types.  

   

2. Build a Single View of Your Customers

Break down data silos and understand customer behaviors in real time. Extend reach across third-party ecosystems to drive hyper-personalization and upsell. Tailor experiences across all channels and move toward dynamic, data-driven pricing.

The Ping Identity Platform is uniquely positioned to achieve this by giving you access to:

• Industry-leading identity management from the moment your new customers onboard to the moment they interact with your services (and that offered by third-party service providers). This will help you deliver exceptional customer experiences across all touchpoints and engagement channels.   
  
  

• Comprehensive capabilities needed to synchronize and reconcile all identity data across your identity infrastructure. This will help you to accelerate interoperability with third-party identity service providers while delivering hyper-personalized experiences to your customers in real-time. 
  
  

• A real-time understanding of your customers’ needs and engagement behaviors. This will enable you to serve up personalized credit, insurance, and banking add-on services at the right time and the right place to help you drive revenue, customer loyalty, and average product holding.
  
  

• The full potential of your customer identity by securely utilizing personal data is in line with local data protection regulations and your consent preferences. This will help you to extend your reach beyond your existing customer base through Open Banking and embedded finance. 

3. Orchestrate Customer Journeys at Pace

Forget code-heavy access journeys. Embrace no-code orchestration for speed and agility. Build, test, and refine authentication and authorization experiences that minimize friction and churn. Enable adaptive access to strengthen your dynamic security posture. 

The Ping Identity Platform is uniquely positioned to achieve this by giving you access to:

• A powerful no-code, low-code identity orchestration engine for all identity needs. This will help you to build, test, and deploy customer access journeys leveraging extensive authentication methods, authorization tools, fraud detection and prevention capabilities, delivering the best experiences to your customers at pace.
  
  

• Over 1,800 integrations with third-party identity verification, multi-factor authentication (MFA), risk management, fraud detection, and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. This will enable you to take advantage of the best apps, systems, and capabilities the industry has to offer.
  
  

• An extensive library of orchestration “flow” templates, configurations, and reference integrations. This will help you reduce development overheads, while leveraging best authentication, authorization, identity proofing, and fraud prevention practices in the industry.
  
  

• Integration with a wide range of third-party identity governance and administration (IGA), privileged access management (PAM), and security information and event management (SIEM) service providers.

4. Secure Sustained Customer Trust

Fortify your identity perimeter. Strengthen onboarding checks to combat new account fraud. Implement frictionless, multi-factor authentication (MFA) to thwart account takeover attacks (ATO). Give customers a choice of credentials and minimize reliance on passwords. 

The Ping Identity Platform is uniquely positioned to achieve this by giving you access to: 

• An extensive range of first-party and third-party identity, device, and behavior risk signals and detection techniques. This will help you to identify and prevent a broad set of attack vectors, from bots and emulators to malware and credential reuse to help you reduce account takeover fraud, while protecting customers’ personal data and their digital IDs.
  
  

• Comprehensive first- and third-party identity proofing capabilities, including the Ping Identity native identity verification service. These will help you seamlessly verify your customers’ identities against government-issued credentials and comply with KYC and AML regulations.
  
  

• Sophisticated fine-grained dynamic and authorization capabilities. These will help you to easily create and enforce policies that govern what your customers (and their delegated access peers) have access to based on contextual signals and pre-defined relationships while significantly reducing developer overheads.
  
  

• Adaptive and risk-based multi-factor authentication including access to a wide variety of authentication methods such as facial recognition and behavioral biometrics seamlessly embedded into your customers’ mobile apps. These will help you to meet strong customer authentication (SCA) requirements and minimize the risk of fraud.

5. Expand Value Ecosystem via API-First Mindset  

Unlock Open Banking, Open Finance, and financial services innovation through secure APIs. Embrace Financial-grade APIs (FAPIs) for embedded finance opportunities within and beyond the industry. Detect and remediate security vulnerabilities across financial API traffic. 

The Ping Identity Platform is uniquely positioned to achieve this by giving you access to:

• All you need to detect and block anomalous behavior on APIs, helping you to mitigate API-driven attacks and threat vectors, while building valuable intelligence around these within your wider cybersecurity operations.
  
  

• Open Banking sandboxes in regulated jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, helping you to accelerate the process of building and testing FAPI-conformant APIs. This will help you to align with complex Open Banking and Open Finance specifications at pace. 
  
  

• The tools needed to extend secure access across your third-party provider (TPP) ecosystem. This will help you to mitigate unauthorized access while expanding the value you can deliver to your customers through your partners.
  
  

• A converged set of capabilities covering the entire end-to-end identity lifecycle, deployable to hundreds of millions of identities across all global jurisdictions and all self-managed, hybrid, and SaaS settings. This will give you the ability to scale at pace while ensuring your IAM investments are future-proofed. 

Don't lose market share to digital-first providers. Instead, leverage IAM modernization to make fintech and insurtech innovation work to your advantage. Break free from IAM legacy, deliver hyper-personalized experiences, secure customer trust, and accelerate revenue, reduce risks, reduce costs and future-proof your long-term IAM investments, across all identity use-cases and needs.

Learn how leading financial institutions like HSBC, Raiffeisen Bank, and TIAA are using the Ping Identity Platform to win the digital battle in financial services, and ensure they are the “strongest species to survive,” as Darwin would say.