Patrick Johnson
Last week, I sat down with Kaarel Kotkas, the CEO and founder of Veriff to talk about how Veriff has been doing for the first 6 months of this year.
The first big question - how did we do?
Veriff did great. Despite the challenging times for the world, we were able to stick to our plans and focus on our roadmap. It’s been great seeing how our automation and development teams have been able to prove how automation is possible within our sector. We now have 90% automation in our core markets in the US and Europe.
Secondly, our mission is to make honest people trusted. This is well-represented by our pass rates, which are now at 95% so we’re providing a comfortable user experience while leaving the fraud at the door and not making life difficult for good users.
Thirdly, it has been really great to see how fast we have been able to build up our document support. Previously we were able to support 4,500 government issued IDs, but today, thanks to our verification operations and research team, we have brought this number to over 8,000. This gives us a clear competitive advantage in becoming the primary IDV service provider to the biggest global businesses.
All of these metrics relate to our verification volumes which have grown on average 35% month-on-month up to the year to date. This has also created a lot of interest from investors, and before going really big, we’ve just raised 15,5 million dollars in financing prior to our Series B.
Why these numbers matter - the conversion, automation and document support - is because these KPIs delivered us Silicon Valley darlings, including one of the biggest companies in the world, as our customers.
How did Covid-19 affect Veriff’s business?
In terms of business, I did not want to become more digitised than we already were, yet we’ve always known that identity is an essential part of any online business. Previously this was more a focus for banks, fintechs and marketplaces, but now the world is understanding that identity is essential for all services online.
We also donated 1 million free verifications to companies that were the most in need. I am really proud that this was incredibly effective and we were able to support non-profit organisations, universities, the healthcare sector to make sure that everything can also be accessed online.
So, tell us more about what’s happened to the Veriff product during the past 6 months? What are the benefits that our customers will see?
It already started in 2019, when we were working really hard on making sure that we can build a product that can be efficient in different customer segments online. We understood that as long as businesses have the right, and in the financial sector the obligation, to choose their customers according to their own regulations and those placed on them, then companies will have a different risk appetite. This led us to build a configurable service, where we put Veriff in the position that it can be served like an a la carte menu. In other words, companies that have very specific needs can choose the configuration that fulfils their risk appetite and needs.
The second thing that we brought along is the new product - Assisted Image Capture. It’s for companies that have just an API integration and would like to verify people for compliance purposes sending document pictures and photos only. It mimics our end user flow and Assisted Image Capture gives real-time feedback to make sure that identity verification is done perfectly at the first attempt.
Thirdly, we worked on our product accessibility. This furthers our plan to make honest people trusted and making Veriff available to all people and customers. Together with the improved accessibility features we are able to provide our user experience also to people with imparied vision and motor skills.
And our latest update is about NFC (Near Field Communication) systems for verification. Using NFC, you just need to take your passport, touch it to your smartphone and after having taken a photo of yourself, we’re able to provide you with a really fast and secure verification result.
Finally, tell me about Veriff’s plans for the second half of 2020.
We are definitely continuing on our growth trajectory. We have a very strong group of customers that we are about to integrate and go live with in the coming months. This has strengthened our belief in our plan to target profitability.
It’s all about improving the product to provide our customers with a real-time verification experience, which is created by the automation that we are investing very heavily in. Automation is what Veriff is known for.
Our final goal is to be where our customers are. This is why we are planning to have a stronger presence in the United States and the UK, by building our revenue teams there. This starts from sales, account management and solution engineers to support our customers who are going live in these markets.
