Dynamic Identification: building the next layer of trust in global commerce
Trust has always been foundational to commerce. But the way trust is established is shifting. For years, the industry relied on static checks, documents, passwords, generic KYC steps, and manual reviews. These systems were built on the belief that static personal data was enough to verify identity. Today, that model no longer holds.
At Adyen, we have spent the last decade investing in the infrastructure required to operate differently. First, we built one global technology platform — a single stack, shared across products and markets, without fragmentation, hand-offs, or vendor dependencies. Then we secured and integrated full banking licences across the EU, US, and UK, aligning technology and regulation under one controlled environment.
Together, those layers have always set us apart. They allowed us to support the rise of global commerce, power unified online and in-person experiences, and help enterprises expand into new markets with trust, control, and reliability. They gave merchants predictability, not because we rented trust from third parties, but because we built the rails ourselves.
Today, we are introducing the next chapter in our foundation: Dynamic Identification.
Why a new identity layer is needed
The financial system is at a breaking point. For decades, static credentials, passports, business registration documents, proof of address, and bank statements were the basis for one question: are you who you say you are? But these methods are struggling against modern reality. They are slow, expensive, and increasingly ineffective.
Onboarding a business still takes days or even weeks. AML systems across the industry trigger alerts where more than 95% are false positives. Fraud controls block up to 10% of legitimate shoppers. Those are real customers lost in the name of security. Meanwhile, cyber-enabled fraud is rising at double-digit rates. And with generative AI, entire synthetic personas and companies can now be fabricated in seconds.
The industry response has largely been to strengthen the lock: add more forms, more checks, more outsourced verifications, and now, layer AI on top of the same aging architecture. But the issue is not the lock. It is the door itself.
Static identity is hitting its limits. The next era requires a dynamic trust model.
Identity as behavior
What if identity isn’t just a document, but a pattern? At Adyen, we believe identity has another dimension: behavior.
A fraudster can generate a convincing passport. They can simulate a business website. But what they cannot easily fabricate is the real, nuanced financial footprint of a legitimate person or enterprise: tapping into public transport, buying lunch, receiving genuine customer payments, ordering from a known merchant, or transacting consistently across online and in-person channels.
These signals, taken in context, across time, are extremely hard to fake. They reflect real economic life, not staged information. And when combined with global banking oversight and unified technology, they form a living, evolving identity signature.
This is Dynamic Identification: a behavioral model of trust built from trillions of interactions across our single global platform, strengthening with every transaction.
A trust layer only possible on one platform
Dynamic Identification is not a separate product. It is a core layer of our infrastructure, enabled by decisions made years ago.
Because we operate a single global platform, we see clean and consistent behavioral signals across online and in-person commerce. And because we hold full banking licences, we are a supervised bank operating under the highest regulatory standards, building trust in partnership with regulators and ensuring safeguards are embedded by design. And because we never fragmented our stack, we can connect signals end-to-end, from payment to payout, onboarding to risk, authentication to settlement.
What this enables in practice
Dynamic Identification improves outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle.
On payments, it strengthens Adyen Uplift, our decision engine that balances fraud, conversion, routing, token usage, and cost. Instead of viewing each signal in isolation, we understand behavior in full context. The result: fewer false declines, more good customers approved, and real uplift, including up to a 6% increase in conversion in some markets. For large enterprises, the impact translates directly into revenue, not just percentage points.
On policy abuse, such as return abuse, reseller rings, free-trial loops, Dynamic Identification detects patterns that traditional fraud tools miss. These are not always criminals; they are opportunistic users who look legitimate in isolation but reveal clear signals when behavior is connected across merchants and time. By seeing this, we protect margin without adding friction to good customers.
Onboarding is simplified. Instead of treating every new business as unknown, we can recognise entities and payment credentials already seen on our platform, reducing manual reviews, skipping redundant steps, and accelerating approval for legitimate merchants. Compliance becomes stronger, not slower.
Access to capital becomes fairer and faster. Traditional lending relies on forms and backward-looking files. With Dynamic Identification, we can underwrite using real commerce behavior across the platform. When trusted shoppers with deep history transact with a new business, that becomes an early trust signal, enabling faster, fairer capital access than traditional methods.
And in compliance, Dynamic Identification unlocks AI Investigator Agents that can process complex reviews in a supervised and auditable way, dramatically reducing investigation time while improving consistency and transparency. These agents are only as effective as the context they operate in, and our single platform provides the richest, cleanest behavioral signals in commerce. That is what makes this approach both performant and scalable. Each of these capabilities is meaningful alone. Together, they represent a new trust architecture for commerce.
A system that strengthens with every transaction
Dynamic Identification is a flywheel. Every merchant brings more legitimate activity onto the platform. Every transaction sharpens behavioral signals. Those signals make trust decisions smarter, which, in turn, improve approval rates, reduce friction, prevent abuse, and accelerate onboarding. Better outcomes attract more volume, and with every cycle, the system becomes stronger, safer, and more efficient.
Trust compounds. Risk is mitigated earlier. Good customers move faster. And merchants expand on infrastructure built for global scale, not patched to accommodate it.
A foundation for what comes next
Just as unified commerce required a unified platform, the next era of digital commerce requires a new trust layer. As AI agents begin to transact, identity becomes less about who is acting and more about whether an action aligns with a trustworthy behavioral record. And as new authentication technologies like passkeys and government eIDs scale, Dynamic Identification becomes the layer that ensures identity is not only proven, but backed by real economic behavior. They prove identity. We prove legitimacy.
Dynamic Identification prepares merchants for that world. It allows trust to move with the transaction, adapting continuously as context changes, not freezing identity at a single moment in time.
We’re not adding friction. We’re removing it by replacing outdated checks with intelligent, adaptive trust signals that strengthen with scale.
And this is only possible because we built the foundation first — a single platform, then banking infrastructure, and now Dynamic Identification.
A new layer. A new standard. A new way to trust, engineered for the future of global commerce.