As businesses are going digital, many countries are pushing legislation and penalties for any wrongdoings. Age verification has become critical to check for various industries. It would serve the interests of different businesses, especially those selling age-restricted services or products. They have to ensure that their products or services are not used by minors, as defined by the laws and regulations of each country.
Therefore, organizations have to keep up with the regulatory obligations to verify the age of their customers and ensure they are not below the appropriate age. Organizations that don’t take these regulations seriously risk significant damage to their reputation. More importantly, they also break the law that in turn puts sanctions or heavy fines that results into a loss of sales.
To ensure companies are not going against any regulations, they should perform appropriate due diligence to verify the customer’s age and identity. Integrating an AI-powered solution to authenticate a customer’s age would provide peace of mind to businesses that deal in age-restricted products or services.
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Risks with Lacking Age Identifier Tools
The Internet can be a great source to generate big revenue for companies. But it could also pose some risks while verifying online transactions. Therefore, it’s important to verify an individual’s age when companies are selling age-exclusive products online. Although these risks are the same for both online and traditional businesses.
Lack of an appropriate age verification procedure would impose heavy fines or penalties that could also put a dip in the company’s revenue. Usually, the requirement to integrate a certain level of application and regulatory control comes with determining the risks.
Cost For Non-Compliance
According to the regulations implemented globally, organizations and their vendors are required to keep up with the compliance. For example, the European Union requires organizations that deal with social media sites to gain consent from guardians or parents to use a child’s data. Although the age varies from 13 to 16 years old, or depending upon the age barrier in each EU state. But counseling services for children don’t necessarily require consent from a guardian or parent.
So, organizations need to verify if the consent is in line with the laws by utilizing appropriate technology. This means that companies have to ensure proper implementation of age verification measures.
For instance, if an organization’s target audience is children – they should ensure appropriate and clear language to address their audience.
Financial Losses
Online businesses are familiar with chargebacks and account takeover frauds that result in a lot of financial losses. By integrating an age verifier into a platform or application, enterprises can reduce the number of chargebacks or account takeovers. The age verification solution is important to regulate age-restricted products or services. AI-powered Age verification solution is proven to be quite effective as opposed to other self-verification methods. As in self-verification methods, people have to check out a few boxes to confirm their age. But it’s not effective in verifying their customer’s age.
Age-Verification Steps For Ecommerce
As people have moved to digital platforms, a staggering number of customers are expected to shop online to buy goods and services. While bringing along innovation to the table, e-commerce sites come across various challenges. Few digital products include alcohol, e-cigarettes, age-oriented content, etc. Businesses have to ensure they are using proper methods to verify their customer’s age.
Payment Cards
Nowadays children would steal their parent’s credit cards to make payments and pass self-check authentication to buy age-restricted products. Most often children don’t choose an authentic platform and end-up paying money on a scam website. Potential fraudsters could easily steal their identities that could lead to credit card frauds.
Chargeback Fraud
As the world has become digitally connected, online transactions are often made through a credit card. Fraudsters use it as a source to carry out a chargeback fraud that could lead to a hefty loss for businesses. Criminals usually buy products online and then claim refunds on purchased items. Similarly, chargebacks could also happen when children use their parent’s credit cards without their consent to make an online purchase. It shouldn’t be confused with a false claim for chargebacks. In this case, the reversal happens automatically but it equally affects the business to lose money.
Account Takeover
In some common cases, children put their information on fake websites or apps that could result in fraudsters taking over their accounts. To provide ease and convenience for online shoppers, websites tend to save their customer’s information. So, when the customers return, they don’t have to put their information again on the website. An age verification solution could be quite useful in preventing account takeovers.
Age verification is necessary and mandatory for industries to keep fraudulent activities at bay. It would help merchants to avoid selling their age-restricted products or services to underage children. Merchants should also make regulations more seriously, as it would help them in gaining the customer’s trust and see an increase in profits.
