Confyrm Joins Capital One to Fuel Consumer Identity Services at Scale

By Andrew Nash, founder and CEO of Confyrm

Startups are formed for many reasons — sometimes it is because there is a challenge that needs to be tackled, and it requires a scrappy little startup to prove that we can make a difference.

Confyrm was founded five years ago with an ambitious vision: to restore trust in digital identities. We recognized that despite an increasing reliance on digital identities, consumer trust in those identities continued to erode. We wanted to make a real difference to reducing online fraud and to make the internet a safer place for everyone engaged in it, but critically to do this without abusing customer privacy and storing personal data.

Identity systems are becoming more and more complex: they are progressively more distributed, federated and outsourced. More critically, digital identity systems are becoming core to trusted online transactions for governments, companies and consumers alike.

To address all of this complexity, we have known for a long time that if we could all share more security alerts using privacy enhancing distribution methods then we could increase safety while avoiding impacting privacy or brand trust.

That is the essence of the shared Identity signals model that Confyrm was based on. Building on that concept, we developed the Confyrm Event Warning System, a platform of shared privacy-preserving identity alerts providing early detection of digital identity risk. The system works by providing early notifications of suspicious account activity with providers across the ecosystem, mitigating the impact of fraud and account theft for both identity providers and consumers.

Confyrm started with a vision of distributing alerts about fraudulent use of consumers’ identities so that identity attacks could be addressed in real time. With the right insights, some attacks could be prevented before they occurred. If a financial service is processing a password reset for your account but detects that your email account was taken over by a fraudster, then an attack on your financial could be stopped immediately. In addition, much like credit card notifications, the consumers could be directly notified and take additional steps to protect themselves.

We were eager to scale our efforts to help restore trust in digital identities, and we were fortunate to find a partner in Capital One, who shared our vision and commitment to improving consumer identity protection.

I’m excited to share that Confyrm has decided to join Capital One, where I’ll be leading Capital One’s growing Consumer Identity Services team.

Joining Capital One was a natural fit for the Confyrm team because of Capital One’s technology leadership, focus on improving banking for good, and our shared vision to improve the online transaction world for consumers.

For Confyrm, this is validation of the vision we had and provides a platform and brand reach beyond that which a startup can manage on its own. Working with Capital One will allow us to massively increase the set of consumers that we can help to protect.

Our thanks to the true believers across four continents that have advocated for us and worked with us over the last five years. The future is enormously exciting.

About the Author: Andrew Nash, founder and CEO of Confyrm, recently joined Capital One as Managing Vice President of Consumer Identity Services. Recognized as a top 100 influencer in identity, Andrew is a veteran consumer identity leader, previously serving as Director of Identity Services at Google, operating the largest consumer identity provider in the world at that time, managing over a billion consumer and enterprise identities. As Senior Director of Consumer Identity at PayPal, he managed over 350 million identities validated for use in the financial services. Prior to that, Andrew worked on a wide range of identity and security systems in his role as Director of Technologies at RSA Security. Andrew has also served on the boards of the Open ID Foundation, Open Identity eXchange, and the Information Card Foundation.

These opinions are those of the author. Unless noted otherwise in this post, Capital One is not affiliated with, nor is it endorsed by, any of the companies mentioned. All trademarks and other intellectual property used or displayed are the ownership of their respective owners. This article is © 2018 Capital One.