Fraud and security concerns have put a spotlight on the identity management market which analysts believe will reach a tipping point this year.
High profile digital data breaches have raised fears over the vulnerability of sensitive personal information revealed during online and mobile transactions, creating a market for solutions that address these security issues.
A new MarketsandMarkets report predicts the global identity and access management market will be worth $18.3bn by 2019, and according to findings from a CrunchBase poll, identity management was identified as the industry expected to see the greatest growth in 2015.
"The frequency of security breaches and surge in related trends like identity theft have increased awareness of more effective methods of online authentication and identity management," said Daniel Mattes, founder and CEO of Jumio.
"While consumers previously may have been willing to accept a certain degree of risk when it came to online and mobile transactions, we're at a tipping point at which companies need to go to greater lengths to protect their customers or risk losing their business as the users themselves demand more security."
The methods used by identity robbers are growing more sophisticated and are therefore harder to combat with traditional means of identity verification, leaving the market ripe for third party vendors and solutions, pointed out Garrett Bekker, senior analyst with 451 Research.
"It's clear there's a lot more interest these days in delivering identity management as a service because it's a lot less complex," he said.
"You can hand off a lot of the complexity to the service provider and you don't have to deal with it."