KYC & BIOMETRICS
Who goes there? Meeting the global identity challenge In a world shifting to digital at lightning speed, identity verification solutions provider Trulioo is helping regulated and non-regulated businesses alike find a proportionate, risk-based, secure response. Here, Chief Operating Officer Zac Cohen tells us how COVID-19 has triggered a seismic change as governments, businesses and individuals balance what seem to be the opposing challenges of staying solvent and staying alive. Consumers have transformed their behaviour to keep safe from coronavirus infection, maintaining their basic supplies and general lifestyles during repeated lockdowns by making a dramatic shift to digital everything. As a result, bricks and mortar shops, hospitality and leisure providers have had to pivot at unprecedented speed, to provide take-away, online, streamed and click-and-collect options, to salvage some remnants of the success they previously enjoyed. To enable this, they’ve completed years-worth of transformation projects to introduce secure ecommerce capabilities in a matter of weeks. It’s tough for existing financial service providers, too. They too are dealing with a huge increase in digital transactions – and a commensurate rise in fraud – all while furiously trying to keep pace with the seamless experiences that customers are being offered elsewhere, ever-
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TheFintechMagazine | Issue 18
mindful, of course, of the regulated environment they’re working in. All of which spells a unique opportunity for identity verification solutions provider Trulioo, which is stepping up to the challenge of a demand never seen before. Billing itself as a one-stop-shop for secure customer onboarding and authentication, it has grown to serve hundreds of small, medium and large clients in 195 countries and counting – it recently extended its operating footprint to Pakistan. Trulioo provides them with everything from initial user experience strategy and design, through to solution implementation via its extensive range of plug-and-play solutions, and supporting analytics. Initially serving regulated industries, including financial services, the past year has seen Trulioo bolt on non-regulated sectors like retail, marketplaces and community platforms. And, boy, is it glad it did, given the demand for ecommerce over the past eight months, which has driven increased need for Trulioo’s secure online identity verification solutions. Its proportionate, risk-based approach to ID verification is a flexible, modular service from which clients pick what's appropriate for them, depending on their regulatory status, where they are in their business lifecycle, which demographic/ channel they're dealing with, and where in the world they are onboarding. And all this against a backdrop of increased competition and closer regulatory and media scrutiny, linked to high-profile cases where bank controls in particular have spectacularly broken down. The company’s Chief Operating Officer Zac Cohen gave The Fintech Magazine’s
Editor in Chief Ali Paterson his take on this turbulent marketplace and what Trulioo is doing to help organisations of all shapes and sizes, adjust to it both now and for the future. THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: What have been the significant ID and fraud prevention developments of 2020 and how has it impacted Trulioo? ZAC COHEN: Businesses have had to deal with an incredibly fast shift to offering their products and services through digital channels. That creates lots of pressures around updating their systems and tailoring their services to this new, online-only reality. Meanwhile, consumers, forced into this online-first environment, have also faced changes related to privacy and security, how their user data is being leveraged in that online world, and how the companies they interact with protect it. Many large banks already had systems or processes in place that they’d built, but are having to accelerate development because, whereas a portion of their services might previously have been available through a digital-only channel, now they all need to be. And, with more organisations offering online-only vehicles, competition for a good user experience is much higher. Banks and neobanks have to make sure their onboarding workflow is high-calibre, or they’ll lose customers. Neobanks and digital-first banks, meanwhile, had an advantage, up until now. They were more attuned to leveraging technology first, taking the entire workflow around the first interaction with a new consumer to an online environment. What’s been changing is the dynamics and demographics of the environment itself. www.fintech.finance