Alain Meier
Head of Identity, Plaid

Alain spent his career building identity and anti-fraud products. Now he’s on a path to lower fraud at scale for the digital finance ecosystem.

Today, we’re introducing an all-new identity verification experience that allows consumers to fast track verifications across Plaid-powered apps and services. Just as commerce providers have delivered on the promise of “one-click” checkout, Plaid is creating the standard for a “verify once, verify everywhere” experience that allows companies to offer faster onboarding while remaining KYC compliant.

Launched last year, Identity Verification helps customers simplify onboarding, acquire more verified users, and reduce fraud – all from one Plaid integration. Since then, hundreds of companies across lending, wealth, proptech and banking have chosen Plaid Identity Verification and many are seeing success rates consistently above 90% – for some, a 50% improvement from other providers.  

Until today, signing up for digital finance apps required repeating the entire identity verification experience every time. Not only is it time consuming, but it also adds friction to the overall onboarding experience. It’s unsurprising that nearly 6 in 10 Americans have given up during a signup process because it was too long or complicated. That's why, we're launching an even faster onboarding experience for verified users within the Plaid network, so that our customers can improve conversion during sign-up.

Unmatched combination of speed and security 

Because identity verification is a necessary step for anyone using digital financial apps and services, we've made it much easier for a user to save their verified identity data securely with Plaid. When they sign up for additional Plaid-powered apps, we can accurately detect that they're a returning user. Once we're able to confirm the identity of that user through security checks on their phone number and mobile device, we fast track their experience by showing a pop up of their saved identity information. 

However, just because a user successfully verified their identity previously doesn’t mean they’ll get the same outcome for future verifications with other apps. To ensure nothing slips through the cracks, we run new security checks according to your settings against the provided information, device history, data sources like mobile network operators, and input behavior, like we would for any user that signs up for the first time. What’s more: we also dynamically update our risk checks based on each business’ requirements and risk thresholds to ensure each user is verified against the required checks according to your unique success criteria. 

From early testing, we’ve seen an average opt-in rate of 70% and users already taking advantage of their saved identity information to speed up their application for different apartments as rental properties heat up over the summer. We’re also seeing this new experience reduce time to complete a verification session in half, delivering a faster experience without sacrificing security. 

Benefits of a full-stack onboarding solution

In addition to providing faster experiences across our network, you can have access to a deeper, more holistic view of a user’s risk at the identity, financial account, and transaction level when you unify your onboarding experience with Plaid.

Now, when a user verifies their identity and links their accounts with Plaid, we detect if your customer is linking a bank account that belongs to them. We match onboarding data from identity verification with the financial institution information on file for an added layer of security. In the Plaid Dashboard, you’ll see “match scores" against the account owner’s name, email, phone number, and address. 

Plaid Identity Verification is fully integrated across the rest of Plaid’s stack, allowing us to deliver value added features that point identity providers can’t. 

Identity Verification that is smarter and more powerful everyday

In addition to channeling our network to deliver accelerated experiences and deeper risk insights, we’re continuously improving our product so that you have access to the best identity verification experience out there. 

• Block stolen and synthetic identities with an enhanced anti-fraud engine: We’ve recently added two new risk signals that assess the likelihood that an identity is synthetic or stolen by looking at whether the identity data is associated with a deceased individual, how many identities are tied to a given email or phone number, the history of an SSN and if there are multiple identities associated with it. Based on these checks, our anti-fraud engine provides a score indicating the likelihood that an identity is stolen, fabricated, or manipulated. These new signals supplement our existing anti-fraud engine that analyzes attributes across email, phone, device and behavior to help you lower fraud and onboard more good users.

• Improved coverage and more languages: To help you verify more users at scale, we’ve also expanded the ID document types and languages we support so that you can verify and win new customers no matter who they are. We now verify green cards and temporary ID cards like B1/B2 visas and have added front-end support for Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and French.

• All-new document capture experience: We’ve significantly overhauled our document capture experience to improve conversion by guiding the user’s capture window, optimizing image file sizes, and supporting more devices. We’ve seen verification success improve by as much as 10% with this new improvement.

One advantage of unifying your onboarding stack with Plaid - from identity verification and account linking to money movement - is being able to offer an end-to-end experience for your users while also having a holistic view of a user’s risk profile. 

Get started

When you use Plaid, you have access to onboarding solutions that are always improving and getting better, without you having to do any additional work. With the size and scale of the Plaid Network, our goal is to continue to deliver differentiated solutions to help you acquire new users at scale while lowering fraud. Stay tuned for more updates. 

With our no-code integration option, you can get started with Identity Verification today or contact us to learn more.