How ID.me Shop Works to Improve Veterans’ Lives

ID.me Founder and CEO Blake Hall discusses the origins and purpose of ID.me Shop

Transcript

Hi, I’m Blake Hall, co-founder and CEO of ID.me. I’m also an Army veteran, and I’m making this recording to explain how ID.me Shop enhances veterans’ and their families’ financial wellness, reduces the risk of identity theft to veterans, enhances their privacy, and generates awareness of the civic benefits veterans have earned.

Specifically, I’m going to walk through what ID.me Shop is: a way for veterans to easily prove their veteran affiliation to organizations that want to honor military service.

At first blush, you might ask what this has to do with government benefits or veterans. Rewind the clock to 2010, when I was getting out of the Army Reserves after a 15-month combat deployment to Iraq from June 2006 to September 2007. A few things were happening that year.

First, the FTC published research showing that veterans are at elevated risk of identity theft relative to other Americans — still true today. The reason: the vast majority of veterans have their Social Security number printed on the documents they use to prove they served. Most veterans don’t have an ID card. If you served over 20 years and retired, you’d have one. There’s also a segment of veterans who get healthcare at the VA and have an ID card, and the VA recently introduced the Veteran Identification Card (VIC) — a big step forward. But millions to tens of millions of veterans don’t have an ID card. Instead, they have a form called the DD 214, issued as part of separation paperwork. That form carries a lot of sensitive data: your name, date of birth, Social Security number in the top right, address history, home of record at time of entry, the station where you separated, your last duty assignment — a lot of personally identifying information. No wonder veterans face higher identity theft risk when they’re handing over documents like that.

Today, on Veterans Day, organizations across the country honor military service, and virtually all of them accept the DD 214 as proof of service. The problem: if you’re getting a free appetizer at a restaurant, you’re showing a stranger a document with your Social Security number on it just to prove you served. That’s not a good trade, and it’s not something veterans should be incentivized to do.

So we reached out to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the Department of Commerce, and said: you have grant funding, and we want to build a better way for organizations to honor military service members and veterans without compromising their privacy or requiring them to disclose sensitive information for a discount. NIST agreed, and there’s a proven model for this — it’s how banking and payments work. You prove your identity to your bank once: name, date of birth, Social Security number. But when you’re issued a credit or debit card, the merchant you pay doesn’t need any of that — they just need to know you have enough credit or debit to authorize the transaction. Military and veteran discounts work the same way. Organizations don’t need your Social Security number or your last duty station. They just want to know you served, so they can honor that. Digital identity lets us apply privacy filters so veterans only have to disclose the fact that they served, not the information that puts their identity at risk.

Nobody likes passwords either. Once a veteran verifies with ID.me, they can carry that verified status with them and quickly prove they’re a veteran to access other organizations and benefits — which is exactly what we do today across brands like Under Armour, Adidas, Yeti, Apple, Verizon, and Samsung.

The other thing that happened in 2010 — something close to my heart — was a program called Stop Loss: an involuntary extension of service members’ enlistment terms. Many of my scouts and snipers were affected by it in 2006 and 2007. Many had young families and had been deployed for the better part of three years, home for only one of those three. My platoon sergeant had four children, all under 10. Others had babies. I couldn’t fathom the sacrifice of being away from your kids that long.

Congress retroactively approved Stop Loss pay after many service members had already separated, which created a real challenge: while on active duty, the military can reach people through the chain of command. But how do you reach veterans who’ve already separated and moved back into civilian life? Despite extensive outreach — from the President, Congress, the VA, veteran and military service organizations, friends and family — the DoD struggled to reach eligible veterans. About 150,000 service members were eligible, at roughly $4,000 each, totaling somewhere between $650 and $700 million in approved combat pay. Even after Congress extended the deadline, only about 20% of eligible veterans claimed it. When the funds expired, roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in combat pay went unclaimed. I found that simply unacceptable.

This is where ID.me Shop helps increase awareness of civic benefits. Veterans may not interact with the DoD again after they separate, and they interact with the VA less often than they interact with the organizations offering them veteran discounts every day. The idea: if we can verify someone as a veteran while they’re shopping with a commercial brand, we now have a way to reach them and their families — by email, by phone — about civic programs like Stop Loss that could benefit them. There’s no relationship between any government interaction and a commercial one, but there is a real connection: if you’ve verified with ID.me in a commercial context, we can make sure that if you’ve earned a benefit as part of your service to this country, hundreds of millions of dollars in earned pay never again go unclaimed.

ID.me Shop was built to increase the financial well-being of veteran families, reduce the risk of identity theft, protect privacy by preventing over-disclosure of personal data, and solve a real communication gap — connecting veterans with the civic benefits they’ve earned for serving this country.

Thank you for listening and for your time.