Today, 40 per cent of customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience.

At a time when more consumers than ever are relying solely on digital channels to engage with financial services, it is important to recognise your customers for who they truly are, and provide the seamless, secure customer experiences they expect. It all starts with customer identity.

A customer's first interactions with your brand usually occur when they register, open an account or apply for a service online. If you lack confidence in your customer's identity at that first interaction, you risk fraudulent account creation and activity.

Every financial services company relies upon technology. They must enable a secure and seamless online customer experience to remain competitive and Identity sits at every step of the process from registration through to authentication, self-service and all aspects of personalisation and privacy. These interactions are critical to acquire and retain customers, build loyalty and revenue and above all retain trust.

The playing field has changed in terms of competing for consumers, and in the digital era the trust established from your brand awareness only goes so far. The digital experience not only needs to adhere to regulations, but it also needs to be scalable and tailored as much as possible to be intuitive and great digital experience. 

Having an optimised and easy-to-use set of processes around customer identity can differentiate your service from that of your competitors. As such, the topic of customer identity needs to be a foundational component that enables your lines of business to obtain their objectives more quickly and at the scale required. 

Discussions about identity management are no longer the chatter of information technology professionals, but increasingly get the attention of even the most senior of business leaders. The advantages can be described in terms such as the average time it takes to convert prospects into first-time consumers of your financial products, or a reduction in customer churn, or lowering the cost of customer acquisition, or reducing risk.

Today's fast-paced digital economy brings many business challenges. Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) helps enforce strong authentication, govern consent, store customer data securely, and provide secure access to applications and services.

Join us at UK Finance's webinar on 20 May, ?How organisations can use Identity to transform Digital Customer Engagement? with Simeio and Ping Identity. You can sign up for it here.