For years, organizations have invested heavily in Know Your Customer (KYC) processes - ensuring that customers are who they claim to be. But a growing number of organizations are realizing that Know Your Employee (KYE) deserves equal attention.
When someone joins your organization (whether as a full-time employee, contractor, or partner) they gain access to sensitive systems and information. Making sure that person truly is who they say they are, and that their credentials are authentic, is essential to protecting your business and your people.
Unfortunately, today’s onboarding processes are increasingly vulnerable. Traditional checks (like résumés, scanned IDs, and degree certificates) are easy to fabricate or manipulate. The rise of AI-generated documents and deepfakes has made deception faster, cheaper, and harder to detect.
The risks are real and are underscored by multiple recent incidents, where imposters had successfully passed interviews and screening checks using falsified credentials. The consequences extend beyond reputational damage. They can include data breaches, loss of intellectual property, or even the disruption of critical systems. These incidents serve as a stark reminder that trust in the workforce cannot be assumed. It must be verifiable.
The Pain Points Behind the Problem
68% of businesses have experienced workforce-related fraud, with impersonation among the most common tactics (AuthenticID), and Organizations lose an estimated 5% of annual revenue to occupational fraud (ACFE).
Traditional onboarding is often fragmented, commonly involving HR, IT, compliance, and third-party systems that don’t talk to each other. Checks are performed once, then stored away.
In a world of remote work and contractor-heavy labor models, this exposure only grows. Once an individual is onboarded, organizations rarely re-verify their credentials, leaving open pathways for fraud, insider threats, and compliance failures.
Simply put: the workforce has changed, but verification methods haven’t kept pace.
Fraud-Resistant Onboarding
Digital credentials bring a new level of confidence and efficiency to how organizations verify and manage workforce identity.
Instead of relying on scanned IDs or emailed PDFs, digital credentials are digitally signed and issued by trusted authorities like governments, licensing bodies, or accredited institutions.
They are designed to be:
This means onboarding can move from a one-time document check to an ongoing, dynamic trust model. One that continuously verifies who’s in your workforce and whether their credentials are still valid.
And because VCs can be designed to reveal only the necessary information (for example, confirming someone’s right to work without sharing their full ID) they also help reduce data handling risks and improve privacy compliance.
Building a layered defence
Most organizations already use Identity Verification (IDV) technologies. This includes using government ID checks, facial recognition, and liveness detection to confirm that a person is real and present.
The next step is to enhance these tools with digital credentials such as mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and other high assurance credentials. Together, they form a layered defense that’s both stronger and smarter.
Physical document verification remains an important fallback, supporting a hybrid world where both physical and digital credentials coexist.
This approach gives organizations confidence at every stage, from onboarding and access control to ongoing workforce management:
Empower your organization with verifiable trust
Recent data highlights the stakes. 30 imposters were flagged in just six months at a Big 4 consultancy firm after implementing enhanced onboarding checks (MBO Partners). This isn’t a niche problem. It’s a widespread risk.
The good news? You don’t need to start from scratch. The tools to protect trust already exist. It’s time to connect them. There’s already a growing ecosystem of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and other mobile documents (mDocs) available in many regions. These can be integrated into your existing onboarding and workforce management processes today.
By combining MATTR’s digital credentials technology with existing IDV partners, organizations can build a future-ready trust framework. One that’s secure, privacy-preserving, and scalable.
Visit the MATTR website to explore our adoption map, discover where high assurance digital credentials are already available, and learn how we’re helping organizations worldwide build trust from the ground up.
