Cases of fraud and money laundering are increasing globally. PwC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey 2020, reports that 47% of companies experienced a fraud in the past 24 months. Again as per UNODC, (United Nation's Office on Drugs and Crime) the estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars. Under this grim situation, it is extremely necessary for the businesses to have a proper identity verification system in place to verify the customer details, to prevent any cases of fraud. Besides it is important for companies to comply with the Anti Money Laundering regulations, and ensure that they are not aiding money laundering knowingly or unknowingly. Keeping up with the demand, the identity verification market is expanding. As per reports, the global identity verification market was valued at USD 6 billion in 2019, and the valuation of the same will be USD 12.8 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 16%.
A company that has emerged as a top player in the identity verification domain is 'iDenfy'. Kaunas (Lithuania) based startup iDenfy is making it easier for companies to avoid any incidents of frauds and money laundering through various advanced solutions. We interviewed iDenfy co-founder Domantas Ciulde to know about the startup.
iDenfy Highlights
| Company Name | iDenfy |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Kaunas |
| Founders | Domantas Ciulde & Gediminas Ratkevicius |
| Sector | Regtech |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Parent Organization | UAB Identifikaciniai projektai |
| Website | www.idenfy.com |
About iDenfy
iDenfy - USPs
iDenfy - Founders & Team
Idea Behind Starting iDenfy
iDenfy - Name & Logo
iDenfy - Revenue Model
iDenfy - Marketing Strategies
iDenfy - Funding & Investors
iDenfy - Challenges
iDenfy - Advisors & Mentors
iDenfy - Acquisitions & Mergers
iDenfy - Awards & Acheivements
iDenfy - Growth & Future Plans
iDenfy - Offers / Coupon Code
About iDenfy
iDenfy offers solutions for Automated remote identity verification service, fraud detection and prevention. Its solutions includes ID verification, facial recognition and AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance. iDenfy's fraud prevention solution complies with AntiMoney Laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) directives in Europe, USA, Australia, Asia and Africa.
"Our vision is to create a full-stack solution, like “SalesForce” in the fraud detection and prevention sector, which would provide essential tools to combat terrorist financing, money laundering, human trafficking, online fraud, and other fraudulent activities." iDenfy co-founder Domantas Ciulde said commenting on the company's vision.
iDenfy helps businesses to smoothly and simply verify their customers with all kinds of possible devices (phones, computers, tablets). Customers have to take a selfie and a picture of their ID, while in the background iDenfy does all the magic from checking ID’s validity and all data from it, face recognition and fraud detection.
iDenfy offers advanced features like '3D Liveness Detection' which ensures that the photograph being submitted by the customer is of a real human and not of any realistic dolls, 3D heads etc. Its 'OCR Auto-fill' feature scans important details from the customer's ID in just a fraction of a second, and thus makes document approval process faster. iDenfy's AML solution is also quite full proof, as it instantly cross checks ID details provided by the customer to Government and Interpol database to ensure that your customer is genuine and legit to proceed with financial operations.
"Fraudsters every day are trying to find out how to bypass fraud prevention and detection systems. With time Anti-Money Laundering requirements are going more strictly, as well as requirements for remote identity verification. For companies to onboard customers safely, minimizing fraud possibility and costs, complying with anti-money laundering, and knowing your customer requirements is not an easy task these days. To complete all the mentioned things, the right identity verification partner is essential. We think, in 5 years, the market size will be doubled or even tripled, the market is growing at a very high speed." Domantas said on the identity verification market.
iDenfy - USPs
Here are certain notable USPs of iDenfy's Identity Verification services-
- Full identity verification service: iDenfy combines advanced Liveness Detection, ID Verification, and Face Recognition into a user-friendly 4-step verification process.
- iDenfy customers will save up to 40% of user on-boarding costs, as iDenfy do not charges for unsuccessful verification. The customers will only pay only for those clients who gets successfully verified and on-boarded in their system.
- Trusted by 150+ companies worldwide.
- Automatic ID document detection recognizes documents by type and country 1300+ documents from 200+ countries supported.
- Customer support 24/7.
- Each verification is reviewed by human supervision.
- Verified in 15 seconds, automatically.
- Make the verification interface your own. Use iDenfy's interface or adapt it to your brand.
- Certified face spoofing detection systems.
- Combines three different face recognition systems to archive the highest accuracy.
Also Read: Secure Your Business With These CyberSecurity Startups In India
iDenfy - Founders & Team
Domantas Ciulde & Gediminas Ratkevicius are the founders of iDenfy. The founder duo knew each other from childhood and grew up in the same neighborhood.
Laimonas was the first employee who joined iDenfy. Laimonas believed the idea as well and he left the big tech company with a well-paid position and joined iDenfy’s small two members team, while the iDenfy co-founders were still working in a 6 sq. m. corner office without any earnings.
Currently, iDenfy is a 20 member team, working in Kaunas Science and Technology Park backed by Kaunas University of Technology.
The iDenfy team strives to build a safer tomorrow together!
Idea Behind Starting iDenfy
The initial idea born in 2015, was to create a system to fight against credit card fraud. After researching, the iDenfy team found that the best method to defend from credit card fraud is identity verification. In the same year, after long studies of computer vision and machine learning an identity verification prototype was created. This first prototype however was only able to recognize passports from one country, but even with that prototype during 2016, iDenfy was successful to find its first clients who later became their first investors as well.
iDenfy - Name & Logo
The name 'iDenfy', is born from the word - identity.
"In the beginning, it sounds like a brilliant name for our startup but running the time we realized that is one of the most popular typos humans are making. All search engines, proofing tools are detecting "iDenfy" as a word with a mistake and auto converting it to identity. We are still struggling with search engines to recognize "iDenfy" as our brand name, not a typo" says Domantas regarding the startup's name.
Also Read: Silversparro - Offering AI Powered Supervisor for Companies
iDenfy - Revenue Model
The commonly used pricing model in the identity verification market is pay per verification. Here, iDenfy has come up with a unique pricing model – pay per successful verification, where, iDenfy charges its customers only for the successfully onboarded customer in their system. While, fake, failed and unfinished verification are free of charge.
iDenfy - Marketing Strategies
The iDenfy team is focusing more on improvising its services and thus to generate a positive word of mouth, rather than spending a fortune on marketing gimmicks. This technique has been successful and today over 150 customers are associated with iDenfy.
"We invested not in marketing, but into technology development. We invested not in the sales team, but invested in researching and communicating what would make our customers' life more comfortable. We invested not in customers' on boarding standards and procedures, but we spent time with every customer as they would be our only one, main customer" Domantas quotes
iDenfy - Funding & Investors
iDenfy has raised a total of 320000 EUR funding in 4 rounds till date.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Pre-seed | 90,000 EUR | Angel Investors |
| 2018 | Seed | 110,000 EUR | Angel Investors |
| 2019 | Seed | 100,000 EUR | Angel Investors |
| 2019 | Seed | 20,000 EUR | Startup Hub Poland accelerator |
iDenfy - Challenges
Major challenges for iDenfy were technical as the product is software.
"The biggest issues working with computer vision and machine learning were how to make face recognition and optical recognition systems more accurate and how to make them detect fake ID or a fake selfie. Luckily, after sleepless nights, we found solutions" quotes Domantas explaining the technical challenges faced by iDenfy Team.
The second problem was team management. Initially the founders thought that the more the number of people in the team, the more tasks they will be able to complete. But gradually they realized the it is possible to complete tasks more efficiently with fewer employees when they are managed in teams correctly. Currently no more than five employees are there per team.
The third main problem was trying to enter markets without local partners (local distributors). Later the founders were convinced that local partners are important for entering into new territories.
The iDenfy team spent a lot of time on product development, but remarkably less on marketing and sales. After they got the product right, however the team comprehended that that marketing and sales are an essential part to reach out to the target customers.
Keeping the employees motivated is another challenge, and bonus system is the best solution to it, as said by iDenfy co-founder Domantas Ciulde
iDenfy - Advisors & Mentors
iDenfy is being mentored by Startup Hub Poland accelerator. Piotr Ciżkowicz, Tomasz Ciżkowicz, Piotr Berta and Marius Parescius are the advisors of iDenfy.
iDenfy - Acquisitions & Mergers
iDenfy Poland is iDenfy's subsidiary company in Poland.
iDenfy - Awards & Acheivements
Following are some of the awards and recognition received by iDenfy -
- 2018 Startup of Lithuania award
- 2019 Startup of Kaunas city award
- 2019 Startup of the Week in Lithuania
- 2020 Fintech startup of the year
- Shortlisted among the top 10 promising Lithuanian-based startups to watch in 2020
- 2020 ISO 27001:2013 information security management system certification
iDenfy - Growth & Future Plans
iDenfy is operating worldwide. The company reported a user-base of over 1000000, and revenue worth 500k+ EUR. The startup's revenue grew by 332.25% from June 2019 to June 2020.
New contracts growth in last 12 months is 168%.
Number of verification done by iDenfy has increased by 190% in the past 12 months (June 2019-June 2020)
iDenfy team's major future goals include-
- Expansion to global markets
- Increasing partnerships with legal and consulting companies
- Development of new fraud prevention and detection systems
- Improve user on boarding experience and success rate
The company is planning to open a office in India soon.
"We found a great guy Ripon Bownik who will operate and develop expansion in India. Ripon is planning to create a local team, open an office in Delhi. Ripon is currently working on software, and pricing models upgrade for the India market. He is also looking for team members who would connect with him for this project. Our current strategy is to find more partners in their local regions." Domantas Ciulde said about the expansion plans in India
iDenfy - Offers / Coupon Code
StartupTalky Readers can use the coupon code StartupTalky23112-idnf to avail attractive offers on iDenfy's services
Author: Chayanika Goswami
Source : https://startuptalky.com/idenfy-identity-verification/
Date : 2020-09-04T12:28:15.000Z