Reported losses from fraud in financial services have surged dramatically in recent years, reaching $3.5 billion^* in 2023 from bank transfer, cryptocurrency, and wire transfer scams alone. This rise underscores the need for financial institutions to implement stronger security measures for risky interactions such as account recovery and transaction authorization.

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To date, OTP, a temporary PIN-code sent via SMS or email to verify users' identities, represents the most popular form of 2FA. However, these codes are vulnerable to compromise through phishing attacks, stolen devices, interception attacks and more, allowing bad actors to exploit them for fraudulent activities. Phishing attacks specifically remain a major risk, leading to 74%^** of data breaches in 2023^**.

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Enter CLEAR Verified: a more secure approach to step-up authentication. At CLEAR, our identity verification solutions use checks beyond traditional passwords and devices. We link a confirmed identity to their selfie for increased security and a seamless user experience. These checks include:

• Biographic Verification: confirms user information against corroborative databases 
• Fraud screening: checks email and device for suspicious signals 
• Document authenticity checks: validates document and flags potential risks 
• Liveness Detection: ensures the user is a real person, preventing synthetic ID fraud

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After initial identity verification, users can quickly re-verify by scanning their face on their mobile device. This biometric customer identification program ensures the user is the same person, offering a secure and frictionless way to strengthen two-factor authentication throughout the user journey. This looks like simply scanning your face to:

• Recover your account
• Log in (instead of OTP on every login)
• Authorize high value transactions or withdrawals
• Confirm suspicious transactions (e.g. Card-Not-Present step-ups)

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CLEAR Verified offers flexible integration and can be embedded directly using our SDK, or easily sent to users by text or email. 

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In today’s ever-evolving fraud landscape, the simple OTP doesn’t build enough trust alone to protect users. If your business is ready to level up your protection with a more secure KYC as a service offering, contact our team for a demo to learn how CLEAR Verified can work for you.

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^*FTC, 2023

^**Verizon, 2023