Prove Acquires Portabl to Offer Reusable Digital Identities

Identity verification firm Prove has acquired fellow digital identity company Portabl.

The deal, announced Tuesday (Jan. 14), gives Prove access to Portabl’s offerings including the company’s specialty: reusable ID verification and networks.

“Think back to the last time you signed up for a new online service,” Prove wrote in a blog post.

“Chances are, you were met with a tedious process of filling out forms, uploading documents, and waiting for verification. This cumbersome experience is not only frustrating for users but also presents security risks and inefficiencies for businesses.”

Portabl, the post added, offers reusable digital identities, an approach based on digital signatures and in W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards such as verifiable credentials.

According to Prove, Portabl provides functionality that lets users securely store positive verifications once in a “device-independent wallet.”

From there, they can choose to share some or all of those attributes and credentials with businesses or service providers, eliminating the need for repetitive verification processes.

Nate Soffio, Portabl’s CEO, said the acquisition comes at a moment when embedded finance and artificial intelligence are driving a change in how people initialize and maintain trust between individuals and organizations while safeguarding user consent and control.

“That’s why Portabl’s prime directive, so to speak, is to solve for trust that travels whether you’re talking about proof of humanity on one end of the spectrum, all the way through to KYC on the other,” Soffio said.

By combining Portabl’s reusable identity credentials and digital signatures with Prove’s authentication and behavioral intelligence, companies will be able to streamline customer onboarding and reduce fraud “across high-risk transactions, marketplaces, and regulated services,” the blog post added.

And as PYMNTS wrote last year, the losses from fraud are substantial. Research from  PYMNTS Intelligence and Hawk has shown a rise in authorized fraud, while separate reports found that 4.6% of transactions with banks were classified as synthetic identity fraud.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke last fall with Catherine Porter, chief business officer at Prove, about the challenge of identity verification in the age of AI and other advanced tech.

“The ‘age of AI,’” she said, where AI defrauds identities by replicating them, “is creating the necessity that consumers and the sites that build platforms for consumers have a layer of trust built into them.”