AFTAs 2020: Best New Technology Introduced Over the Last 12 Months (Data and Data Services)—Socure

If numbers tell a story, the $96 million in funding—$35 million in the latest round alone, in August 2020—raised by New York-based identity verification service provider Socure over its eight years in existence speaks volumes about the value of granular information in the know-your-customer (KYC) market. But that’s not even the whole story: The vendor already has more than 400 clients, almost 200 employees, and is growing revenues at close to 100% year-on-year. Why so much interest? Here’s another number: In 2019, identity fraud racked up almost $20 billion in losses to US businesses. 

Socure’s mission is to be able to identify all US identities while also exposing all instances of identity fraud, using data from the internet and other factors such as IP addresses, and devices and operating systems linked to specific individuals, making up for shortfalls in traditional credit bureau data that can lead to inaccurate decisions, false positives, and an inability to “unify” data relevant to up to 40% of the US population, says co-founder and CEO Johnny Ayers.

The vendor’s Intelligent KYC product, launched in June 2020, is the culmination of these efforts, a rebuilt version of an existing solution, but with an additional 7 billion rows of data, covering around 225 million known IDs, and more advanced logic and matching, to build “the most intelligent KYC service in the market, with the broadest coverage and largest known base of consumers,” according to Ayers.

“We spent eight years testing and tuning almost every data source available to find the most accurate, relevant, authoritative, predictive and compliant data … across all dimensions of an individual,” Ayers says. “All our fintech and bank clients and partners use Intelligent KYC for unifying client IDs and opening new accounts,” which helps companies automate approvals and reduce the number of manual reviews required.

Moving forward, Socure will continue to add new data dimensions, and in the first quarter of 2021 will roll out a velocity engine that will help spot instances of fraudulent cell phone use and identity theft.

Beyond finance, Ayers says the vendor will expand horizontally into other heavily regulated industries, such as online gaming, healthcare, and government.