• Stephen Ufford, Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Trulioo


• 04.10.2017 12:07 pm

Financial IT: What makes Trulioo special compared to other providers and what are the solutions that you bring to the market? 

Stephen Ufford: Trulioo is a leading global ID verification company that offers instant electronic identity verification to help businesses comply with cross-border Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements.  With the ability to verify 4.5 billion people in over 60 countries, Trulioo offers the most robust and comprehensive identity intelligence data from over 200 trusted sources globally.

Through a single API, we help companies scale into new markets faster, more efficiently and in a cost-effectively. Our end-to-end solution automates workflows and processes, eliminating the need for customers to burden themselves with time-consuming and costly manual tasks, such as procuring data vendors, vetting sources, executing multiple contracts, ensuring technical specifications and requirements are met for each data source, and adhering to international data privacy laws. Our standardized API allows for customized rule sets, resulting in greater transparency, agility and flexibility and making it easier to meet the requirements of the ever-changing regulatory landscape.

We enable increased trust and safety online by powering fraud prevention and compliance systems for hundreds of clients including payment providers, eCommerce, financial services providers, online gaming, and online marketplaces. We also partner with other world-class organizations to deliver best-in-class solutions for our products and services.

Fiancial IT: What are the trends you are mostly excited about and what do you foresee next for the industry?

Stephen: With the rapid advancement of technology, comes complexity and ever-changing regulatory obligations. In the future, consumers will still need banking services, but the way in which they access these services will change.

AI, biometrics and a move towards a mobile-first economy, will change the face of the industry as we know it. The financial landscape will become more immediate, infinitely scalable and more flexible and adaptable.

Micro-merchants too, will continue to change the face of eCommerce, driven by an increasingly mobile workforce and a changing digital landscape. The shift towards a truly borderless marketplace, will see the current numbers – it’s now estimated that there are over 25 million micro-merchants and approximately 5.5 million small merchants worldwide – continue to grow. With this growth, also comes the increase in risk, which will lead us towards stricter due diligence and regulatory requirements.

The need for ubiquitous identity verification is paramount, in order to stomp-out merchant-based online fraud. AI and biometrics will power identity verification of the future.

We are already seeing alliances between leading incumbent financial services and technology companies using robotics and AI to address key pressure points, reduce costs and mitigate risks. They are targeting a specific combination of capabilities such as social and emotional intelligence, natural language processing, logical reasoning, identification of patterns and self-supervised learning, physical sensors, mobility, navigation, and more. And they are looking far beyond replacing the bank teller.

Financial IT: How does Trulioo harness innovation to address these challenges and trends?

Stephen: Our mission is focused around three principles, trust, privacy, and inclusion. Our team is dedicated to building a framework of trust online, developing best privacy practices, and advancing financial inclusion.

Our new Global Business Verification solution provides clients with the ability to automatically validate company vitals – including business registration number, company name, address, status, key management personnel, and date of incorporation – by querying hundreds of government registers and public records in real-time.

Clients also have the option to request business registration documents – containing shareholder information and annual reports – from the applicable in-county register, identify the primary beneficiaries or Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs), and perform watch list checks.

The application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in our Global Business Verification product helps automate compliance workflows by extracting data from official documents retrieved from government registers. And with use of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), extracted data can be reliably allocated into searchable fields where it is then delivered into a formatted and consumable report, which can be reviewed during the due diligence process.

Our Business Verification solution empowers organisations with the necessary information required for Know Your Business (KYB) due diligence to help meet regional and international AML/KYC compliance requirements.

By combining Trulioo’s Global Business Verification, Electronic Identity Verification (eIDV) and ID Document Verification solutions, customers gain access to secure and reliable data sources and are able to instantly verify entity details, perform watch list checks, and identify and verify UBOs – all through a single API integration. Trulioo assists clients in satisfying compliance requirements as they seamlessly onboard customers, while also mitigating risk, reducing fraud and adhering to a diverse range of current and future compliance regulations.

Trulioo’s innovative Business Verification technology represents another step forward in the identity sector, making it easier for people and organisations to trust the businesses they are transacting with online on a global scale.

Financial IT: Going forward what are the major plans you have for Trulioo?

Stephen: With an inevitable move towards a global, mobile-first economy, Trulioo plans to develop its technologies, resulting in faster, more secure electronic identification processes. Through the use of AI, OCR, NLP, and biometrics – combined with mobile capabilities – Trulioo will expand its Data Marketplace to include traditional and alternative identity attributes and data sources.

In the future we will look to broaden and scale this model, ensuring it encompasses a wide range of secure, reliable data sources, adding value not only to the data, but to the marketplace itself.

In turn, this move forward will promote the growth of a truly global and inclusive digital economy.