The Veriff Product Review 2020 - The Road to Lightning Fast Verifications with a Brand New Standard for Pass Rates

TLDR – If you're our partner (or partner-to-be) and you're usually lacking the time to know what Veriff has been up to, then this data-driven executive summary about Veriff’s Product in 2020 is meant for you!

It has been an unorthodox year. Despite the global distress though - there is a(mazingly) lot to be proud about. 

Bill Gates has stated that “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” I think looking back over the year, we actually underestimated how much we could achieve in a year. Let’s look into it together.

What happens in the minds of the people who are asked to prove their identity?

No-one wakes up and thinks "Today is the day that I can finally verify my identity!", we don't start the day with a desire to enter our credit card details into a form. It’s a necessary evil, particularly if we want to buy our Christmas presents online – we'll have to enter our credit card information as part of the checkout process. The same applies for online identity verification. We believe that (on the contrary to a few other companies and their missions) the less time a person spends with Veriff, the better the experience with us. And oh boy, did we save time for people needing to go through Veriff in 2020.

In the beginning of the year our average response time for a verification decision was 84 seconds. Today it’s 18 seconds, with 94% of the checks done automatically with no human review needed (compared to 46% in January ‘20). The main driver for achieving this is automation, where our automated decisions take about 3-4 seconds. This is together with improving our internal verification tooling and speed of our technology stack.

Response time in seconds in 2020.

What’s next? Do we stop here? Let’s try and count down from 18 and see when you give up. (18, 17, 16…). You can see where I'm going with this – 18 seconds seems like a really good time but it's still way too long for an average person to wait before they can move on. People are used to the fact that technology products work in a heartbeat and that’s the reason why we won’t stop until at least 95% of the verifications have a response time of a couple of seconds. 

A present from our Product Team to the Product People 

(As you can probably already see) We in Veriff’s Product Team live by data. So, during 2020, we focused a lot on making other Product people happy, and helping them so they can focus on their core business. Veriff often plays a key part in our partners' onboarding funnel. If you're the (product) person responsible for onboarding and measuring conversion then the last thing you want is the funnel leaking i.e. people disappearing into a black hole called identity verification without even understanding why. 

Veriff is successful only if our partners are skyrocketing and we know that it’s absolutely crucial for you (and therefore us also) how many individuals you send to Veriff and how many of those people end up being successfully approved.

Pass rate (How many individuals Veriff approved for our example Fintech client in EU and US with fraud rate ~5%).

One of the many drivers behind high pass rate growth is our internal database of government issued ID’s that our specialists and automation use as a single source of truth. Our document research team has been busy the entire year to make sure that we can recognize ID’s from over 190 countries.

Number of unique government issued IDs recognized by Veriff in 2020.

If we leave the early adaptors aside (yes, you tech savvy people) then an average person is usually going through the online identity verification process for the first time in their life. When we do something for the first time in our life then we usually suck at it – big time – making loads of mistakes. Mistakes cause friction and this in turn increases the chance for the person to quit. This is where Veriff comes in – the key to less friction is assisting the person and giving them real-time feedback as they progress (that's the core reason why we built the fully-automated product Assisted Image Capture) and that's the reason why our verification flow went through surgery – less steps, simpler and more real-time feedback.

The never-ending battle with Fraud as more businesses move online 

We just released our Fraud Report for 2020 where we can see that as businesses move online to adapt with the lockdowns, so do fraudsters. For obvious reasons there is not much I can share as we’d like to keep our fraud prevention tools a secret from the very same people who we’d like to catch. What I can say is that we have added new risk labels and opened up our fraud risks which are now visible to our partners and consumable via API. We also started to support biometric document scanning on our Mobile SDK and barcode extraction on US and Canadian IDs, which have been some of the handy tools together with our video-first approach and network & device analytics, in helping us allow only honest people to access services online. 

Other tiny improvements keeping our partners in mind

The list is long but we wanted to highlight some of the Product features we rolled out in 2020, serving our partners and their requests. We said hello to PDF export and to a new-look Veriff Dashboard (Station/Hub) – keeping in mind our partners who use Veriff’s Dashboard daily as part of their tooling. We expanded our extraction capabilities by starting to support address extraction. We listened to our partners from mobility and started to extract the driver's license category to help them make sure people are eligible to drive. We reduced the sizes of our Android and iOS SDKs to 5MB to help our partners keep their app sizes small and made many, many, other upgrades that you can read about from our monthly product updates.

Thank you to our partners - without your continuous feedback to our Product team, life would be like finding THE needle in a needlestack. 

Another shout-out to the team behind it - starting with our Product team but as we are truly a team who works across the organization then this thank you is as much to every single Veriffian making trust reliable and scalable online. 🙇

Bring on 2021!