Global identity management market to register boost

A new MarketsandMarkets report predicts the global identity and access management market will be worth USD 18.3B by 2019 and, according to findings from a recent CrunchBase poll, identity management was identified as the industry expected to see the greatest growth in 2015.

Findings indicate that merchants paid more per USD of fraud in 2014 (USD 3.08) than they did in 2013 (USD 2.79), driven by the increased adoption of self-service and mobile transactions. Not only are mobile transactions more susceptible to fraud, mobile-channel fraud costs merchants more than any other channel (USD 3.34 per dollar of fraud losses compared with other channels, including mail and telephone).

New kinds of fraud built from stolen data have also emerged, making it even more difficult to verify identities through traditional means of authentication, further driving the growing identity management market to the forefront. According to Javelin Research, someone whose information is revealed as part of an online data breach becomes 9.5 times more likely to have their identity stolen.

Synthetic identity fraud, which can use stolen data to falsify identities, is on the rise as hackers can use data exposed during a breach to create new identities. Synthetic identity theft now accounts for nearly 85% of the more than 16 million ID thefts in the US each year finds the Federal Trade Commission.