The Covid-19 pandemic escalated the digital transformation for businesses of all sizes and sectors worldwide. This digital sprint has brought along many new opportunities for businesses to operate securely online, using trusted identity software to avoid the danger posed by bots and deep fakes. Identity verification has become relevant for every business to operate and succeed online, and it is the first critical step for knowing who the customer is. Moreover, businesses also have to face the changing compliance requirements as well as the increasingly stringent “know your customer” (KYC) regulations that are sweeping the globe. As a result, it has never been more critical for organizations to stay on top of their local KYC regulations, taking the time to fully understand the ins and outs of their respective programs in order to avoid being hit with large fines and reputational damage. This is where a secure identity verification solution provider such as Veriff comes in. In a nutshell, Veriff is a global online identity verification company that enables organizations to build trust with their customers through intelligent, accurate, and automated online IDV.  With the largest document specimen database on the market, Veriff’s intelligent decision engine analyzes thousands of technological and behavioral variables in seconds, matching people to more than 10,000 government-issued IDs from over 190 countries. “Our automated decision engine verifies an ID a thousand times faster than humans. It’s far more efficient, objective and accurate than a human being can ever be,” begins Kaarel Kotkas, Founder and CEO, Veriff.

With technological advancements all around, people expect a fast, secure, and seamless online experience. For a business to retain customers digitally, they must provide this sought-after experience, otherwise, customers will just leave. Veriff’s onboarding feature establishes better trust online between a business and its consumers. This process starts with a built-in KYC feature, which is helping to meet stringent regulatory requirements online. Using artificial intelligence to gather data on the backend, this feature provides additional security measures for identity to be truly verified to enable more online trust between businesses and consumers.

What Makes Strong Identity Verification?

Businesses are constantly challenged to get the customer to the next step in the buying process; if they don’t, it massively affects the business’ bottom-line, making this feature more critical than ever. Tackling these issues, Veriff has the strongest identity verification service available online. Its innovative technology leverages more than 1,000 data points to give transparent responses and provide security and trust for businesses. While others in the space have focused on document data extraction and lightweight verifications, Veriff offers the most accurate online identity verification service with its video-first approach that expands the reach of its service capabilities across sectors and use cases.

Veriff provides the best-in-class KYC verification and is a one-stop-shop integration for KYC & AML checks by providing a guided AI-powered intuitive user experience. The solution is crafted to provide real-time feedback to the user if there are issues via Assisted Image Capture. Moreover, the built-in dynamic fraud prevention tools are designed to make identity fraud detection as easy as it can ever be.

What makes the company unique is its ability to provide almost instant verification (about 6 seconds at its shortest) and over 95% verification success on the first try. This is thanks to its multi-channel operation (web, mobile, native SDKs) that provides a 30% potential increase in conversion rate. 

Machine Learning for KYC

When performing repetitive tasks in scale, humans make mistakes, whereas machines do not get bored, tired, or distracted over time. Within the identity verification industry, many rely on a term called document verification, which is the process of confirming the authenticity of a document to ensure it’s not counterfeit by just extracting data from the ID document. Unfortunately, the biggest misconception is that IDV is about data extraction. There’s no data verification about the authenticity of the document or whether it belongs to the person presenting the ID document, whereas most other providers also focuses on human reviewers and picture matching. What sets Veriff apart is the variety and richness of collected data from each session. This information helps to improve Veriff’s machine learning decision engine. “We cross-compare verification sessions based on device, network, and customer behavior, whereas our competition treats each verification session as the first. Instead of just matching two pictures, Veriff leverages device and network information, customer behavioral information in a video-first approach,” points Kotkas.

Veriff serves a global portfolio of organizations across the fintech, crypto, gaming, and mobility sectors. Veriff’s AI-driven intelligent system powered by machine learning verifies a person’s identity in a matter of seconds. It’s far more efficient, objective and accurate than a human being can ever be. While explaining the company’s value proposition Kotkas recalls an instance when the team assisted Mintos—a marketplace for investing in loans. Besides the technology solution that fulfills Mintos’ identity verification needs, Veriff goes one step further. The company’s team understands the problems that the client encountered, and possible hiccups in customers’ journeys. Veriff helped the client to work more efficiently and provide additional security for the investors. Veriff also readjusted the flow from their side to provide users with an easy switch from desktop to a mobile phone during verification, helping Mintos to improve the conversion rate while simultaneously improving the Veriff product itself.

The Mission to Redefine KYC

Veriff was founded in 2015 by Kaarel Kotkas; he was inspired to innovate based on a technical glitch he found while using an online payment provider to make an online purchase. The experience set Kotkas on the path of developing a better and more secure ID verification process. Later, in 2015 when he was doing a case study for Wise, to help them solve the same identity problems, Kotkas realized it was a problem that couldn’t be fixed without starting from scratch on a new approach. This is when Kotkas laid the cornerstone of Veriff.

Today, Veriff is a company of 400 people with teams in Estonia, the US, the UK, and Spain solving identity problems across the globe. It is Kotkas’ plenty of energy and enthusiasm, that encourages the Veriff team to stand for honesty in the digital world. “One principle that I have transferred from physics to business is the law of conservation of energy.  In other words, the more energy and effort you put into something, the better the result. With a little effort there are no good results,” extols Kotkas.

With Veriff the team is planning to build the infrastructure for trust online.  Also, as there is a lot of potential for secure IDV, Veriff estimates that at least 4 billion verifications are needed every year.  Based on these numbers, Veriff has an opportunity to grow 100x over the next  5 – 7 years. With that vision, Veriff’s latest $100 million investment round brings its total funding to $200M and its valuation to $1.5B. Veriff’s investors include Tiger Capital, Alkeon, IVP, Accel, Mosaic Ventures, Y Combinator, Nordic Ninja and others. “Our goal is to become a home for people’s identity online — to provide a secure global platform where a person can store their identity profile — government-issued IDs and other validated personal information that strengthens the identity profile. While maintaining the identity profile, we would act as a “PayPal of Identity,” allowing people to have full control over where, why, and how they share their identity. We will protect people’s data, never sell it to third parties, and use it only to provide identification services. We are working towards the goal that by 2025, it is not just governments that issue ID documents to people, it’s also Veriff. Having a Veriff’s ID, people will have full control over where and why their data is being used,” concludes Kotkas.