Cognito - Phone number based identity verification service

@chrismessina This looks more like users will have one Cognito account, and use it to log in to lots of apps. At least, that's what my goal would be. Will be able to persist the account across new phone numbers etc. Edit: Wow. After reading more on the site, this is really cool.

@chrismessina Thanks for posting us, Chris! We're not actually a TFA competitor - we're competing against those services that verify your real-world identity for anti-fraud and "Know Your Customer" regulations. Instead of providing your name, date of birth, address and SSN when signing up for a service, we link name and phone number to someone's real-world identity allowing businesses to just collect name and phone number instead. This provides huge security benefits to consumers and businesses (https://blog.cognitohq.com/ssn-f...) This is also a much more secure alternative to those questions you may have been asked before when opening a new credit card like "what color is your 2001 Toyota Corola?" or "where did you live in December 1998?"

@alain explain to me how you do the real-world identity linking? Do you send a postcard? Or I'm confused by what you mean by "real world identity".

@chrismessina We connect the databases that exist today with hundreds of millions of americans for the purpose of verifying your identity when you sign up for a credit card, a loan, a bank account, etc and connect it to someone's phone number automatically. This allows a business to use our APIs to go from customer phone number -> their name, date of birth, address and SSN. Does that make more sense?

@kleinkleinklein This is a great point and is absolutely something we think a lot about. There are other personal identifiers that have much more favorable properties that we intend on supporting in the future to further improve consumer and business security. This is our first step towards trying to kill "knowledge-based authentication" https://blog.cognitohq.com/ssn-f...

@jesserank Thanks for the question, Jesse. Increasing conversion rates is a large benefit of using Cognito. This opens up the number of businesses who can use identity verification by a large margin because many companies collect name and phone number but relatively fewer companies collect SSN and date of birth as well. Increased security while improving conversion rates.

@androidlove we agree that emails are a wonderful identifier, they just can't yet be linked on a mass-scale to deep identity information. Phone numbers, however, can be linked to your identity. We're not suggesting phone numbers as a two-factor authentication method - we are suggesting them as an alternative to knowledge-based authentication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kn...) Right now people can log into darknet markets and buy thousands of stolen identities. Cognito blocks those kinds of identity fraud for your business because a user has to verify possession of a phone first. *That's* what we're replacing. Our customers are companies like financial institutions who at the moment basically accept that your SSN is your SSN on faith (because all of the data used to authenticate you has been leaked online). Wouldn't you rather receive an SMS one-time pin when your SSN is being used to sign up for a service rather than it being silently used for identity fraud?

@akdm_ ah, thanks for that info!

@chrismessina @akdm_ Thanks! Right now we support the United States

@chrismessina @alain Thanks for the answer, are you going to support more countries?

@chrismessina @akdm_ Definitely.

@chrismessina @alain Any roadmap or some more informations about it? :)