Verifai helps organizations by providing a platform that combines ID verification with a wide range of checks to establish a customer’s identity securely. Inspired by payment service providers (PSPs), Verifai’s software offers easy-to-configure interfaces so organizations can integrate a know your customer (KYC) process into their web applications or mobile apps in a snap.

Identity documents are captured and read automatically, while at the same time only the necessary data is processed, following the privacy by design principle. Verifai also has near-field communication (NFC) support, which makes it possible to determine a document’s authenticity conclusively. Additionally, biometric checks such as face matching can be used to determine whether the document actually belongs to the applicant. As Verifai is built as a platform, organizations no longer need to link various suppliers in order to fully set up their KYC process. Several market leaders from the financial, telecom, and retail sectors have joined the platform as launching customers since it was founded in 2017.

 

The problem and the search

Verifai started in 2016 when Belsimpel looked for an easy-to-use method to establish customer identity without unnecessarily invading privacy. Jeroen Doorenbos, founder of Belsimpel and Verifai: “On the one hand, we wanted to improve the customer experience, both in stores and online, by speeding up the ordering process. On the other hand, we wanted to reduce the number of fraud cases significantly, without processing more personal data than strictly necessary: an important wish and a requirement of the European GDPR legislation.”

“During the search, we noticed that existing identity verification providers did not fully meet our requirements around ease of use, security, and privacy. The providers mainly came from a sector that previously focused on physical passport scanners, for example at airports. They had less experience in developing products aimed at consumers, so the user experience and conversion were lacking”

“Besides this, we noticed that existing solutions often sent and processed personal data to servers located abroad, sometimes even unencrypted, which meant that our privacy demands could not be guaranteed. We also noticed that entire identity documents were often sent to the servers unshielded, which meant that more personal data was being processed than necessary.”

 

From in-house solution to spin-off

To develop a suitable solution, Jeroen Doorenbos and Jeroen Elkhuizen, founders of Belsimpel, set an in-house development team to work. Given the history of the company, this was not an unusual step. Belsimpel has been developing almost all of its software in-house since it was founded in 2008 and therefore has a large team of developers. Belsimpel also launched a spin-off before: in 2014, insurance company Tulip Assist was created. Jeroen Doorenbos: “Because we had set the bar high, the project turned out to be more challenging than expected. Nevertheless, after four years of development, we have built a complete identity verification solution to offer our customers the best experience. Our fifteen years of experience with customer verification when purchasing mobile phone subscriptions has certainly helped us in this regard.”

“When we started the project, we did not yet understand the extent to which our identity verification challenges corresponded to those faced by other organizations,” Jeroen continued. “It wasn’t until we shared our initial plans with partners almost by accident that we noticed how excited they were about the technology we were developing. To help other organizations with similar identity verification needs, we decided to incorporate our technology into a new company that would be called Verifai.”

“With Verifai, we want to meet a rapidly increasing market demand for digital identity verification solutions. Organizations from many industries have an identification requirement or desire to capture identity documents as part of fraud prevention. However, at the same time these organizations do not want or are not allowed to process all personal data, such as the social security number. We make it easy for companies to get a clear picture of their customers’ identity while complying with strict data processing standards. We do this by using privacy filters, which automatically mask sensitive personal data on the document.”

Read more about Verifai at https://www.verifai.com