Sidestepping the question of whether Twitter rises to the importance of needing verification, I believe that identity verification is a huge missed opportunity

Sidestepping the question of whether Twitter rises to the importance of needing verification, I believe that identity verification is a huge missed opportunity for banks. There’s no reason why US users should be sending personal info to an Israeli company for anything, especially this. A bank has traditionally been the place where we keep our most valuable physical assets. They are secured and insured. Security is part of the service they’re providing. Moving to the digital world, banks could also have been a natural place to store digital assets such as identity info, credit info, and email addresses/phone numbers. Then, instead of every random website asking for this info and storing it for an indeterminate amount of time, the bank would proxy it to them. Being a “data bank” would be a highly regulated privilege, with license to store this info. Any non-licensed entity would be prohibited from storing things like SSNs. This reduces the attack surface to only the most important entities. As critical infrastructure, these data banks would also receive periodic stress tests, just as physical banks do today.