We've been looking forward to this announcement for a while, and now we're happy to finally tell you that we've partnered up with Plutus. Plutus are looking to make cryptocurrencies more accessible, and easily spendable, anywhere and anytime. And with their help, here's an explanation why they want to do that, and why they need Veriff's help. 

The first Bitcoin purchase happened way back in 2010, when two pizzas were bought for 10,000 BTC, which now equates to over $450 million. Yes, those are some seriously expensive pizzas.

However, despite the nature of that very first purchase, cryptocurrencies are still more commonly used as an investment rather than for daily spending. This is partly because it is impossible to spend cryptocurrencies at your local stores. Currently, everyday retailers simply don’t accept cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, and this is something that could take years to overcome. 

Plutus - Making Crypto Spendable Anywhere

Plutus is a start-up looking to solve this, enabling cryptocurrencies to be spent anywhere in the world as originally intended by the pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Plutus combines a cryptocurrency wallet, an exchange, and a Visa Debit Card into one easy-to-use app. This allows people to instantly convert their cryptocurrencies into spendable card balance, effectively making crypto spendable anywhere.

Plutus has managed to combine upcoming cryptocurrencies with the traditional payment systems so that people can pay in crypto using a physical debit card at over 60+ million stores. What’s more, every time the user spends with their Plutus Card, they earn 3% cryptoback, making it one of the most rewarding cards on the market.

The above product set combined with traditional neo-banking features put Plutus in a strong position to rival well-known finance applications.

Companies like Plutus need to make sure that their customers are who they claim to be, to avoid criminal activity, like money laundering and financing of terrorism. Verifying an identity seems like it should be easy - the customer provides pictures of their document and all is good. However, this only scratches the surface. It’s necessary to make sure that the person sending those photos is the genuine owner of those documents, that the person hasn’t used photoshop to tamper with the photos, and you’ll need to do this for hundreds of users a day, without compromising on the time it takes to sign up.

This is why ID verification providers are becoming more widespread within the industry. Before switching over to Veriff, Plutus was using another vendor to verify their customers, but due to challenges they decided to look for another provider. As Plutus’ COO Jasper Tay put it: 

“We undertook research on a number of KYC providers and we were impressed with the product offering, founders, roadmap, and professionalism of Veriff. The value proposition that Veriff brings to the table for our rapidly growing user-base is tangible.”

With a new ID verification vendor popping up weekly, it can be difficult to navigate between different vendors. Jasper shared some tips on what to look out for, when picking a new provider. “From a user point of view, it boils down to two main factors; ease-of-use and the security of user data, both of these are achieved by Veriff to a high standard.

 When an organisation is selecting a KYC provider, they need to ensure that the checks being processed are robust and thorough, but don’t overextend what is required.

Here at Plutus, we have plans to expand beyond our current regions of availability in the UK and Europe to include both Asia and Latin America; the strengthened compliance offered by Veriff is a part of the necessary toolkit for enabling our international expansion.” 

We at Veriff hope that this partnership will help Plutus create an additional layer of trust with their customers, and help continue their mission of integrating crypto into our daily lives.

Veriff and Plutus have partnered up so they can continue their rapid growth while always knowing their customers, and helping make crypto spendable anywhere.

An announcement of the partnership between Veriff and Plutus, which combines a cryptocurrency wallet, an exchange, and a Visa Debit Card into one easy-to-use app.

Plutus partners with Veriff to Make Crypto Spendable Anywhere

Braian is a Data Scientist at Veriff, working at our Data Extraction team. He joined the company in February 2019. He's originally from Brazil, and moved to Estonia for his job at Veriff. His everyday work-life involves experimenting with various solutions and implementing them into our product. His engineering career began in Brazil, where he worked on multiple interesting projects and improved his skills in that way. Our conversation covered his career, challenges, and life at Veriff. Enjoy!

To get readers up to speed, let’s talk about your professional life. How did you decide to choose this career path?

I have been interested in tech from a very early stage of life - I had a computer that I could build and set up by myself, and I loved the procedure of doing that. My huge interest in computer games also had a big influence on deciding my career path. 

That's what pushed me to go into the Software Engineering world - I started my university studies in Brazil with a Computer Science program, which helped me get new skills and learn a lot about Software Development. 

What’s the story behind your first Engineering job?

During my university studies in Brazil, I started working on various projects that would help me learn more about programming. One of these projects was an application for the gym I was going to during that time - I created a scheduling system for them. 

This project led me to start a Software Development internship in a company developing a management system for small shops. It was a great experience to be part of that company and get more insights into this field. During my internship, I understood that the path I wanted to take was more into Data Science, and I decided to put a lot of effort and time to develop my skills in that field. 

How did you switch from Software Development to Data Science?

As my interest in Data Science and Analysis grew, I started trying to apply it in my internship tasks from time to time. This is the way I tried to change my career path and switch from Software Development to Data Science. I started working on projects related to Data Analysis and developing products to understand this field in more detail.   

One of the biggest projects started in 2012. I decided to build a startup with some of my classmates and create a Data Analytics platform. Everything was going great - we successfully managed to onboard clients, get funding, and the platform was working well. It was a fantastic experience to build products related to Data Science and Machine Learning. 

At the beginning of 2018, I decided to look for a job outside Brazil. I wanted to start a new adventure and take on a challenge that would help me achieve interesting results. At first, I was searching for opportunities in bigger countries such as France or Germany, but I couldn’t find anything in those areas. 

After a while, I saw an ad on Instagram for a program called “Career Hunt”. The program was about bringing people to Estonia and arranging interviews with Tech Companies here. I took it as a great opportunity because I was looking for a job in my field. I applied, and Veriff accepted, allowing me to visit Estonia for the interviews in December 2018. The procedure was very interesting - I met the team, learned more about the product, and understood the challenges Veriff had at that time. The interviews went well.

Veriff sent me a job offer after a month, and I decided to relocate to Estonia to start a new journey. 

What was the main factor for you to join Veriff?

The position that Veriff offered was exactly what I was looking for. Also, the team was fantastic, and I was sure that this opportunity would help me grow, develop my skills, and improve professionally. 

I saw a lot of potential in Veriff back when I was joining. Mostly, it was because of the team behind the product. That was one of the main factors to relocate to Estonia and start a full-time job here. 

Which of Veriff's values resonate with you the most?

The first value that comes to my mind is - "We always have each other's backs". This is primarily because of the great team we have here at Veriff. 

As I mentioned, I moved to Estonia because of my job at Veriff, and in the beginning it was pretty hard for me to fully adapt to everyday life here. My team showed great support in that sense - it was nice to know that my colleagues had my back in both my professional and personal life. 

How would you describe your everyday work-life at Veriff and what are the challenges you face?

My daily tasks at Veriff are very diverse. Most of the time, my schedule depends on the life cycle of the product I’m working on. There are some days when we have lots of meetings to understand the needs and milestones we need to achieve first. Then we need to figure out the technical challenges behind every solution. 

There is a lot of communication with Data Ops. It is really important to know what kind of data we need to collect and annotate. Experimenting with different solutions can take a lot of time, and it can be challenging to apply these solutions to the real world. 

Thanks for the answers! Let’s move on to some quickfire questions now.

In my free time, I love playing computer games and swimming.

My recommendation to everyone who wants to learn more about the different strategies and develop a startup idea would be to read ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries. It helped me a lot to understand this field more.

I enjoy listening to sports-related Podcasts - mostly about Football and Formula 1. I also like podcasts about Data Science, for example "Data Skeptic", which gives me some insights about my job. 

I prefer a PC. I don’t use any Apple products.

If you weren’t an engineer, what would you be?

I would probably try to be a professional swimmer. I feel really passionate about the sport, and that's the reason I try to improve myself in this. I have participated in some swimming competitions, and I enjoyed them a lot.

What would be your advice to everyone who wants to kick start their career in the Engineering field?

I would suggest starting by building projects that you can relate to. Take easy steps at first and work on something that is fun to create. That way, you will start acquiring skills that can be useful for your professional engineering career. There are many valuable online resources, and it’s easy to start learning by building real projects.

Braian Dias moved from Brazil to Estonia to work for Veriff as a Data Scientist. Learn about where his career started, what attracted him to Veriff, and the challenges he faces in his daily work.

A blog interview with Braian Dias, a data scientist from Brazil who works for Veriff.

"It was nice to know that my colleagues had my back in my professional and personal life"

Veriff in 2021: The Story So Far

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!

We caught up with our CEO & Founder, Kaarel Kotkas, to chat about what Veriff has achieved in 2021 so far, and what we've got planned for the rest of the year.

We caught up with our CEO & Founder, Kaarel Kotkas, to chat about what Veriff has achieved in 2021 so far, and what we've got planned for the rest of the year. Watch or read the interview below!

An interview with Veriff CEO & Founder, Kaarel Kotkas, about Veriff identity verification from January to June 2021, and what's planned for July to December.

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Plutus partners with Veriff to Make Crypto Spendable Anywhere

"It was nice to know that my colleagues had my back in my professional and personal life"

Veriff in 2021: The Story So Far