Consumers demand stronger digital security as trust becomes decisive

At a glance

What this is: IDEMIA Secure Transactions reports that consumers now rank security above convenience and cost when choosing digital services, reflecting a wider trust shift in online transactions.

Why it matters: For identity, fraud, and digital verification teams, the finding means customer trust increasingly depends on how clearly security is embedded into onboarding, authentication, and transaction journeys.

By the numbers:

• The IST study covered more than 3,300 respondents across 11 countries.
• 96% of global respondents consider themselves frequent users of digital services.
• 74% worry about fraud via digital tools and 74% fear theft of personal data.
• 38% have already been victims of hacking or data theft globally.

Context

The security gap here is not a lack of digital adoption. Consumers are already deeply embedded in digital services, but their confidence depends on whether providers can make risk understandable and protection feel built in rather than bolted on. In identity and verification terms, trust is shifting from a back-office control to a visible part of the customer journey.

For digital identity, fraud prevention, and transaction security teams, that changes the governance question. A system can be functional and still lose trust if customers cannot see how it protects data, prevents misuse, or reduces account takeover risk. The article's core message is that consumer acceptance now tracks the quality of security assurance, not just the convenience of the service.

That pattern is especially relevant to identity programmes because consumers are not evaluating controls in technical terms. They are judging whether the experience feels safe, comprehensible, and resilient under fraud pressure, which makes identity assurance a customer-facing control domain, not only an operational one.

Key questions

Q: How should organisations make digital identity controls understandable to consumers?

A: They should explain the purpose of verification, authentication, and step-up checks in plain language at the point of use. The goal is to reduce uncertainty, not to expose implementation detail. When people understand that a prompt protects accounts, data, or payments, they are more likely to accept the control and trust the service.

Q: Why does consumer trust depend on security in digital services?

A: Because users increasingly judge the quality of a digital service by whether it protects their identity, data, and transactions. If security feels weak or invisible, confidence falls even when the service is convenient. In high-trust journeys, security is part of the product experience, not a separate technical layer.

Q: What do security teams get wrong about digital identity fraud controls?

A: They often treat spoofing defence as a complete solution and overlook the software path where fake media is inserted. That creates a verification gap, where a system can reject bad photographs but still accept a fabricated live stream as legitimate.

Q: What is the difference between digital convenience and digital trust?

A: Convenience is how easily a person can complete a task. Trust is whether they believe the service will protect them while they do it. A service can be fast and still lose users if its identity and security controls are confusing, inconsistent, or visibly weak.

Technical breakdown

Why consumer security perception now drives digital trust

Consumer trust in digital services depends on whether security is experienced as part of the service, not as an invisible back-end property. When users worry about fraud, data theft, and online vulnerability, they judge the provider's ability to protect identity, transactions, and personal data as part of the product itself. This makes trust a governed outcome rather than a marketing claim. For identity teams, the practical issue is that authentication, verification, and fraud controls now shape service adoption as much as usability does.

Practical implication: design identity journeys so protection is understandable to the user, not only technically sound.

What the adoption-security gap means for identity verification

High digital adoption with low cybersecurity understanding creates a governance gap in identity assurance. Consumers may use digital services frequently, but many do not understand the threats or the protections in place, which means providers carry the burden of making identity and transaction security credible. In practice, that pushes IDV, IAM, and fraud teams toward clearer assurance signals, stronger step-up controls, and user communications that explain why verification happens. Trust breaks fastest when the control exists but the customer cannot interpret it.

Practical implication: align verification steps with clear user-facing signals that explain risk reduction.

How security features become a trust signal in digital services

Security features are no longer just defensive controls. They are part of the competitive promise a digital service makes to consumers, especially in payments and other high-trust environments. Encryption, tokenization, authentication, and secure chip design only help the business if they also support a consistent user experience that feels safe and predictable. The important governance shift is that identity and trust are now linked to product design decisions, not only policy documents. That makes cross-functional ownership essential.

Practical implication: treat security controls as customer trust enablers and measure their effect on adoption and retention.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The objective is to exploit consumer trust and weak understanding of security controls to enable fraud or theft without immediate resistance.

1. Entry occurs through normal digital adoption, where consumers use online services without fully understanding the security controls protecting them.
2. Trust is stressed when fraud, hacking, or personal-data theft creates a gap between perceived safety and actual risk.
3. The impact is erosion of confidence in providers that cannot make identity protection visible, understandable, and reliable.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Sisense breach 2024: A credential in Sisense's GitLab reportedly opened S3 buckets of customer tokens, passwords and certificates; CISA urged a full reset.
• CISA Private-CISA GitHub leak 2026: A CISA contractor's public GitHub repo exposed AWS GovCloud admin keys, Artifactory credentials and plaintext passwords for six months.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Security has become a trust-control, not just a fraud-control. The article shows consumers are no longer choosing digital services only on convenience. They are evaluating whether providers can make security credible at the point of decision, which turns identity assurance into a visible service attribute. For IDV and IAM teams, the implication is that trust must be designed into the journey, not explained after the fact.

The consumer understanding gap is now a governance problem. High digital usage does not mean high cybersecurity literacy, and that creates a structural dependency on providers to translate risk into usable assurance. This is where identity governance intersects with fraud prevention: if users cannot understand the protection model, the control value is diluted. Practitioners should treat clarity as part of control effectiveness.

Digital payments expose the strongest version of this pattern. In transaction-heavy environments, security-related features shape consumer value perception as much as speed and convenience do. That means authentication, tokenization, and verification cannot be judged only by internal control coverage. They must also reduce perceived friction while preserving confidence, which makes user trust a measurable design requirement.

Identity assurance is becoming a customer experience discipline. The article's most important signal is that consumers expect security to be seamless, robust, and future-ready. That combination is hard to deliver if identity, fraud, and product teams operate separately. The practical conclusion is that trust outcomes need shared ownership across identity governance, product design, and risk operations.

Quantum readiness matters because consumer trust is forward-looking. The article's discussion of emerging technology shows that users will tolerate complexity when they believe providers are preparing for it. For identity and security leaders, that reinforces the need to frame future cryptographic and assurance changes in business terms. Practitioners should treat future-readiness as part of present trust management.

What this signals

Consumer trust is now a control outcome. Identity, fraud, and transaction teams should expect user perception to influence adoption as much as policy design does. That means verification flows need to be understandable, consistent, and clearly tied to risk reduction, or the organisation will spend control effort without earning confidence.

The gap between digital adoption and cybersecurity awareness is operational, not abstract. When people use services frequently but do not understand the protections in place, providers have to carry more of the trust burden. For identity programmes, this is a signal to improve customer-facing explanations, not to simplify away security controls.

Security that customers cannot interpret is weaker in practice. The next stage for identity governance is to measure whether controls reduce both actual risk and perceived risk. That is especially important in digital payments, where security-related features increasingly influence whether consumers stay with a service or switch away.

For practitioners

• Strengthen user-facing assurance signals Show consumers why a step-up check, transaction verification, or authentication prompt is happening, and tie it to fraud and data-protection outcomes.
• Align IDV with journey design Make onboarding and transaction security understandable in plain language so users can recognise protection rather than interpret it as friction.
• Measure trust alongside control coverage Track whether stronger authentication and verification controls improve perceived safety, completion rates, and repeat use, not just policy compliance.
• Prepare consumer messaging for future cryptographic change Build communication plans for evolving security topics such as post-quantum readiness so customers understand why changes are being made.

Key takeaways

• Consumers now treat security as a primary reason to choose one digital service over another, which raises the bar for identity and verification design.
• The study links high digital adoption with persistent fear of fraud and personal-data theft, showing that trust gaps remain despite everyday use.
• Identity teams need to make security visible, comprehensible, and measurable in the customer journey, not just in back-end controls.

Key terms

• Digital Trust: Digital trust is the set of cryptographic and identity controls that allow systems, users, and services to verify each other reliably. It includes PKI, federation, certificates, and authentication foundations that must remain adaptable as technologies and threat conditions change.
• Identity Assurance: The confidence an organisation has that a person or system is truly who it claims to be before access or action is granted. In modern IAM, assurance depends on evidence quality, channel trust, and the strength of verification around high-risk decisions.
• Consumer-Facing Security: Consumer-facing security is the part of a control design that users can experience directly, such as prompts, verification steps, fraud warnings, and recovery flows. Its effectiveness depends on both technical strength and whether customers interpret it as protection rather than friction.
• Step-up Authentication: Step-up authentication is an additional verification step triggered when a session becomes higher risk or a user attempts a sensitive action. It is used to reduce exposure without forcing extra friction across every interaction, which makes it useful for runtime access governance.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme, covers NHI governance, machine identity security, and secrets management. It is designed for practitioners who need to connect identity controls to wider security and trust outcomes.