Identity verification has long been a cost center for banks, but IDPartner wants to flip the script. It’s building a network that would let businesses prompt customers to identify themselves by logging in with their bank IDs.

Banks invest huge sums in building safe, accurate know-your-customer (KYC) verification systems – and they should be able to offer those efforts as a service, according to a group of former Santander executives.  

IDPartner is creating a network that lets businesses prompt people to log into their sites using their banking credentials. The system will give firms confidence that their customers are who they say they are, since they’ve been vetted and authenticated by their banks.  

Meanwhile, the system gives consumers an easy, secure way to confirm their identity – through a button that “works like a social login from Google or Facebook, except it connects to the user’s bank,” CEO Rod Boothby tells Insights Distilled.  

It ultimately lets banks turn their investment in KYC into a source of revenue (each time a business gets a successful ID verification, it would pay a small fee), while also building deeper relationships with customers. 

“By giving banks the tools to manage digital identity as a new asset class and by aligning marketplace incentives to drive adoption by companies and users, we can transform the most frustrating identity journeys into an experience as easy and familiar as social login,” according to Boothby.  

The company just raised a $3.1 million seed round of funding and is modeled after Norway’s BankID ecosystem, which has 99% adoption in Nordic countries.