Patrick Johnson
Hi, I'm Patrick from Veriff, and I’m really happy today to be joined by Kaarel Kotkas, our CEO and Founder, to chat about 2021 - how things have been going in the first half of the year, and what we’ve got planned for the second half of the year. So, Kaarel, 2021 - we’ve got six months behind us, how has Veriff done?
We’ve done great, to be very blunt and straightforward at the beginning.
I think it all starts from sticking to our strategic approach and things that have been working well - to always deliver the best product, but also be the best company to ever work with. And all those things combined have enabled us to grow within this market very very rapidly, and also enabled us to close the $69 million Series B investment back in April, led by the best-known, tier one VCs like IVP and Accel, which we’re very proud of. So, this was definitely a strong sign that the approach we’ve taken has been the right one, and going forward it makes us the hottest identity start-up in the space on every level.
Another thing to point out is the expansion of new use-cases - we've seen the education sector entering the market for more accessible services online, specifically to provide remote examinations and make sure that everything is done in a legitimate manner so it can be considered equal with physical face-to-face examinations. We’re also empowering notaries from within Europe to be more remote and to enable notarised contracts to be done from a distance. Finally, there's also the account recovery use-case, which is an excellent example of where identity verification is essential for every service online.
And looking more specifically at Veriff’s product in the first half of the year, how has that evolved and developed, and what are the benefits that our clients have seen? And their customers?
I think this has been driven by the development of the marketplace, where previously global internet businesses needed to have multiple identity verification partners to match their global scale. This isn’t the case anymore - we now support twice as many documents as our nearest competitor within this marketplace, and we're also the primary and only provider for most of our customers in this space. Companies are coming to us in order to grow globally and serve their global user base.
Another aspect is the user experience point of view, where we are pushing to become the verification provider that has the fewest steps to take. This is crucial, as many people, still today, are doing online identity verification for the first time in their lives. So we definitely have to make it easy for honest people to be trusted from a distance.
A very important part of a conversion is also the response time, and the real-time verification experience. Our automation capabilities are now supporting more and more companies and countries at over 90% automation rate, and this has also brought our average response time down to six seconds. And if you consider what can be done in six seconds - I can now confidently say, a lot. That’s the thing that makes it very easy for online businesses to leverage identity verification because it can scale, it’s convenient, and it adds very few extra steps to bring trusted people onboard.
Looking at the second half of 2021, as we move towards the end of the year - what are our plans and what are we looking to achieve?
We are going to leverage our Series B investment. This is something which will help expand our go-to-market (GTM) functions and teams, to be close to more and more customers and serve them where they are based. Next to expanding our GTM functions, we’re going to have more vertical teams. So, if you think about Veriff’s product coming from horizontal teams delivering our service, but also now having more verticalizations in place and more knowledge so we can go deeper to support customers in fintech, mobility, crypto, to name a few. And this is so we can always be more customer-focused, to support them on their journey.
And finally going further, it’s all about the product and engineering developments that we’re going to introduce next to those horizontal teams delivering the product capabilities and metrics we have, helping our new verticalizations and more specialized teams to go more in depth and support more and more companies globally.
We are also very actively hiring new talent, and finding new teammates to support us on this mission, so definitely check out veriff.com/careers, add it to your bookmarks, this is something that is a very interesting space to keep an eye on as we’re very excited to bring new people on board.
Fantastic. Well, Kaarel, thank you so much for your time, and let’s keep up the good work for the rest of 2021!
