While in attendance at Gartner’s Identity & Access Management Summit last year, I sat in on a presentation by research director Tricia Phillips, who predicted that by 2022, digital businesses with great experiences during identity corroboration will earn 20% more revenue than comparable businesses with poor customer experience.

Identity is now a critical way to access online services. Unfortunately, many solutions require customers to jump through more hoops online, and verification can take hours, or even days, during the account opening process.

We all hate it, including banks, and that’s why 40% of people who open an account online never get around to completing the process.

The Way We Think about Fraud Risk Is All Wrong

Companies must balance risk with the user experience. Risk can mean a lot of different things to different people. There’s financial risk, reputation risk, operational risk, regulatory risk — and all of them carry a revenue impact. But in the quest to reduce risk, too many companies have put up hurdles to ensure that someone is who they say they are online.

Banks and other online companies are risking a lifetime of revenue by putting too many obstacles in front of honest prospective customers. As a third-party verification company, we at Jumio think it’s important to remember that, based on our own findings, roughly 99% of human customers are legitimate and present low fraud risk. Experian reported a similar fraud rate (subscription required), with only 89 out of every 10,000 requests to access a current account made by an imposter. So then why do we treat customers like criminals?

We don’t have to look very hard for answers:

• Over 4 billion records exposed in 2016.

• 96% of sites with log-in pages were the victims of bot activity in 2016.

• Last year, 143 million consumer accounts were compromised at Equifax alone.