REGTECH
Network effect: Trulioo is building a framework of trust
Trulioo’s aim is to allow everyone to participate in the digital economy by making sure they have a digital footprint that is verifiable and secure. COO Zac Cohen believes the changes being accelerated by COVID-19 will bring it closer to that goal “We need to re-evaluate how we approach identity, how we think about the online account opening process, and, most importantly, trust and safety online overall.” When those words belong to Zac Cohen, chief operating officer of global identity verification service Trulioo, speaking on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it pays to take notice. Vancouver-based Trulioo has come a long way since 2011, when it set out on its mission to improve financial inclusion by ensuring everyone with a digital footprint can be verified and benefit from the online economy. It’s now a leading player in the world of digital identity verification, counting international banks, Fortune 500 enterprises,
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TheFintechMagazine | Issue 17
tech giants and global companies of all sizes among those who use its solution to help meet know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and inform the user experience around them. Its Global Gateway is an identity marketplace of more than 400 trusted data sources and the company has invested heavily in building a low-code developer tool called EmbedID to allow its customers to easily integrate and plug into that database. Trulioo knows that no-one can afford to stand still in this constantly evolving space. Here, Cohen discusses how the pandemic has only amplified that. THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: To set the scene, what were the challenges global businesses were facing when it came to identity, pre-COVID-19? ZAC COHEN: The challenges typically fell into three buckets for us. Global businesses have global customer bases and each one is diverse, each has its own unique characteristics and each customer base brings a unique set of demands. So, when you think about a company that operates globally, how do you manage the onboarding programme in 30, 40 or even 100 different countries around the world, without spending huge sums on compliance, operations, personnel, and unique user experiences? Managing
that diversity is one of the big challenges. The second challenge is the regulatory landscape. If you work with customers online, you must confirm their identity, and, as a global business, you alone are responsible for designing, managing and, ultimately, adhering to the regulations within that vertical around identity verification. It’s complex and the penalties are stiff. Last year, AML fines totalled more than $8billion, globally. The volume of regulatory change has increased nearly 500 per cent, compared to 2009 levels. So it’s significant, when you think about the ramifications of that regulatory landscape and how many departments within your global business it will hit, whether it’s risk, operations, legal, customer relationships, design, security, etc. The last thing we think about is change. We live in a dynamic, highly competitive, ripe-for-disruption type of world. So how you build your business for change, and how you react or take advantage of that change, is often the difference-maker between long-term success and failure. TFM: So, what is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these challenges? ZC: The biggest change for identity that the virus has brought about is really its impact on the digital experience. We’ve gone from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ digital www.fintech.finance