AiThority Interview with Janer Gorohhov, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Veriff

Please tell us about your role and the technology you handle at Veriff.

As co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Veriff, I lead Veriff’s product and innovation to ensure that our verification engine continues to evolve to stay ahead of market needs. We are building a product to solve the lack of trust online, and empowering businesses with the right tools to fight against fraud and seamlessly verify users and customers.

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What is Veriff and how does it enable customers with data verification and management procedures?

Veriff is building an infrastructure for trust by allowing any website and mobile application to match its users with a government-issued ID. Through powerful artificial intelligence, Veriff analyses thousands of technological and behavioral variables in seconds, verifying people from 190+ countries.

With nearly all organizations around the world moving their transactions online in 2020, making sure your users and customers are who they say they are has never been as important. Veriff’s global reach enables organizations to build trust with customers and scale across borders.

How do you leverage AI ML and InfoSec tools for data verification systems? Tell us about your product roadmap for 2021-22.

Each verification that we do helps us to improve our AI and fraud detection. The more fraud we see across industries, the better we become in shielding our partners – mainly due to cross-linking verifications based on documents, biometrics, device or behavioral information. Once we catch a fraudster, when they come around again we already know.

A lot of exciting pieces are coming together for Veriff, and we believe 2021 will be a banner year for us. Most importantly, we will continue to ensure that our verification flow is simple to use and works in a heartbeat and that our partners trust our objective decisions.

Looking ahead to 2021 and 2022, we will aim to give small- and medium-size businesses a new improved set of tools based on our enterprise offerings, to enable more businesses to move online.

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Tell us a little bit about your remote workplace and team collaboration tech stack. How did COVID-19 make you a better manager?

As an Estonia-based company, Veriff was in a unique position when COVID-19 lockdowns began. We just took our laptops home and everything was set to be able to continue remotely.  The transition was relatively simple as so much of what we do here — from voting to education — is already online.

I’ve always followed my personal values of empathy and transparency while managing teams. I think now more than ever these virtues have become important. Especially when you can’t physically be in the same room as your team, you need over-communication. Luckily, I got the opportunity to prepare for this while we were part of Y Combinator in 2018, when in order to be on the same page with Kaarel Kotkas, our CEO and Founder, we called each other despite the 10 hour time difference multiple times a day, and we even do now during the times of lockdowns.

Document Fraud: How do culprits manage to bypass exiting verification systems? Tell us more about your recent report on data fraud in COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns led to a spike in digital activity this year, resulting in increased fraud rates. Our report indicated several jumps across industries during the pandemic, for instance, fintech fraud more than tripled in the spring as a result of more people moving their banking online. Mobility fraud had a 16 percent increase in the second half of the year,  with more providers ramping up services with users moving away from traditional public transportation to safer alternatives such as bikes and scooters.

Scammers use a variety of techniques to use web services and defraud people. Many times bad actors create “synthetic identities,” or fake identities using real information such as social security numbers to start using online services. We’re also seeing an increase in the use of deepfakes, synthetic media where an image or video of a person is replaced with the likeness of someone else.

After analyzing millions of verifications from around the world, we found that the most common type of documents used to steal, falsify or illegally verify an identity is an ID card (51%), followed by a driver’s license (27.4%) and a passport (19.1%).

Hear it from the pro: 3 Predictions related to the role of technology and human practices in the Online Document Verification industry:

1. More businesses will move online, and therefore, it becomes even more attractive for scammers. We will see the fraud trend continuing on the rise and businesses needing a partner to focus on ensuring trust.
2. Humans will always have a place in Online Document Verification, but it will decrease in time. Mainly fighting to protect companies from complex fraud.
3. The rise of AI solutions will carry over to fraud, making it harder to separate between real or (deep-)fake without having technology involved.

Top 3 industries that would be fastest to the adoption of verification / document check automation tools / platforms –

This year identity verification went from a nice-to-have to a business imperative for organizations across industries. We anticipate that IDV will continue to grow in the key markets we serve (fintech, crypto, and mobility)  and that we’ll see significant growth in healthcare, where verifying your health status as vaccines are rolled out will be critical, and hospitality, which will be looking for new approaches to verify travelers safely and quickly.

Another industry that we expect to see growth is education, with students in both K-12 and higher education continuing with remote and hybrid learning, fast identity verification will be critical to keep learning going and ensure assessments are secure.

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Chris Adjei-Ampofo, CIO, Uphold

Thank you, Janer! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.