O2 wants to identify customers on behalf of third parties

Online retailers should automatically match data entered by customers or providers such as name, street, house number, zip code, city, date of birth and e-mail address with the customer database of the German Telefónica subsidiary O2. O2 is now offering this service under the name KYC Match. KYC stands for Know Your Customer, which refers to the identification of customers, usually to prevent fraud.

O2 emphasizes that it does not pass on customer data. Instead, the retailers send the data entered by the customer to O2 via an application programming interface (API). A score of 0 to 100 is calculated there, indicating the extent to which the information entered matches the customer data already stored at O2. The retailer then decides for himself up to which value he accepts the customer data.

In addition to retailers, the network operator also addresses other online services with registration, such as social networks and travel agencies. In the latter case, fraudsters sometimes register and rent out accommodation that does not actually exist. Travelers book, pay and then find themselves without a roof over their heads. For O2, data matching is a new source of money. The company has not published a price list.

O2 is trying to make the offer palatable to its own customers as protection against identity theft. Anyone who does not want to take part should remove a tick set by O2 in the "Selfcare app".

GMSA Open Gateway

KYC Match is the result of an initiative by the international network operator association GMSA for globally standardized interfaces to telecommunications infrastructure. The interfaces of the"GMSA Open Gateway" are defined as part of the "Camara" project, which is based at the Linux Foundation.

Ericsson has founded a joint venture called Aduna for joint marketing. The Swedish equipment supplier owns 50 percent, with the remainder being shared by the network operators Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom including T-Mobile USA, Verizon, AT&T, Telstra, América Móvil and others. This project is intended to bring together the GMSA Open Gateway interfaces of the various networks under one roof and offer them to customers such as cloud providers, hyperscalers, platform operators and software manufacturers. The planned automated query options include, for example, device status, telephone number, edge cloud functions, billing by the network operator and device location.

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