Enabling Innovation Without Fraud: Our Investment in Socure
The global shift to a digital-first economy is accelerating as people consume more services online and on their phones. To enable this paradigm shift, businesses are faced with new challenges of validating users and security. Balancing beautiful user-first experiences that grant instant access to rich products and features, and the friction of manual validation steps before gaining entry has become the new battleground where companies and bad actors are facing off. User flows that are too open will face a deluge of fraud and fake accounts, while ones that are too restrictive will have conversion problems in getting prospects to become active users.
Enter Socure, a modern digital identity solution that seamlessly classifies good prospects from bad ones using thousands of behind-the-scenes variables as well as a homegrown database of known good and bad identities. Socure is a purpose-built solution designed to handle the wave of new online users because its machine learning models have learned from every identity it has already seen. As former COO at Braintree and General Manager at Venmo, I knew immediately that the Socure solution would be a game-changer because the solution can be used in every step of the customer lifecycle, from account creation to login to transaction.
The ongoing pandemic accelerated consumer demand. With physical locations closed due to lockdowns, even the most legacy businesses have had to figure out how to serve their customers remotely. As businesses tried to accommodate the transition online, customer-facing markets like fintech, healthcare and e-commerce boomed, but existing weaknesses became clear. Legacy solutions were poorly equipped to handle the new challenges of a primary online world.
When I met Johnny and the Socure team, I was immediately struck by the potential market for their powerful solution. Socure had built a differentiated solution that has the largest known good and known bad digital identity graph of US consumers. This is groundbreaking for companies attracting new customers because they can intelligently decide where to add a little friction for suspicious actors while reducing friction for the known customers, limiting painful, conversion-killing manual steps to only the riskiest population.
Since launching in 2012, Socure’s team has already made a massive impact on industries like banking and fintech. They serve a rare mix of diverse financial institutions and 75+ fintechs across neobanks, online brokerages and personal financial management. Their customers span 3 out of the top 5 banks, 6 out of the top 10 issuers and 3 of the top Money-Service businesses. The solution has expanded into car rental, online gaming, online pharmacies, and many others as the need for validating digital identities is better understood.
We’re excited to partner with Johnny and team as they enable this massive wave of innovation, without fraud.
