Trusted source for global real-time ID verification

For Veratad Technologies LLC, excellent timing and smart technologies have driven growth at a time when fraud and regulatory controls exert greater pressure on enterprises. Its age and identity solutions are deployed to protect retail, e-commerce, age-restricted commerce, financial service, education, healthcare, telecommunications and market research entities. Veratad is also the verification provider for the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

While strategic alliances and an early acquisition of technology have bolstered its market penetration in the past decade, Veratad remains a hands-on business. "We're still a small shop and our clients get special attention," said John E. Ahrens, Chief Executive Officer at Veratad. "We provide a lot of professional services both during and after integrations and my team always shares industry best practices when integrations get done."

Integrations might include Veratad's AgeMatch, which compares online visitor data entry against billions of records to prevent unauthorized online access to age-restricted products or content. In addition to verifying name, address, age and Social Security Number (SSN), its IDMatch solutions encompass knowledge-based authentication, with challenge questions to confirm identity. Veratad also offers document validation and out-of-band, two-factor authentication, with voice biometrics, to authorize payments in real time, the company noted.

A partnership with the GB Group has proven mutually beneficial. "We provide them with U.S. verification and they give us access to verification of individuals in over 170 countries worldwide," Ahrens said." We have access to over 2 billion citizens worldwide where we can verify and validate information with data, and if you add document validation of passports and drivers licenses to that, with our portfolio of providers we're pretty much a global age and identity provider at this time."

Privacy first

Within Veratad's suite is a solution created to protects sensitive customer information. The patented technology triangulates data, so given three elements such as a name, address and the sum of the first and last digits of an SSN – not the more commonly used last four digits, a known target for data thieves – individuals can be securely identified.

"We are very big on privacy," Ahrens said. "Of value to our end users is the fact that we don't collect and store data, we're not data aggregators. We're getting information from trusted and verified sources, not scraped or self-reported data. We don't use credit information either; we only use the credit header information."

For businesses and consumers, privacy protection is critical. "All we provide is that momentary seconds' access to the data and to validate it, and then it's gone," Ahrens said. "All we keep is a footprint for that transaction. We are primarily standing between our clients and the world of billions of non-public trusted and verified data sources."

ISOs welcome

A number of ISO partners have reseller arrangements with Veratad. According to Ahrens, ISOs typically either work jointly on integrations with clients or they allow Veratad to contract directly with end users, in which case ISOs then support the process.

"We do have some bigger ISO processors who have us integrated as a third party in what we call our gateway arrangements and those third parties can integrate our service to be delivered to their end users via the platform," Ahrens stated. "The API is very simple. Most of our integrations are done within a day or two." Once integrated, clients have online real-time web-based access through an online portal.

Whether merchants are boarding new customers or serving repeat customers online, Veratad aims to create a frictionless environment where the merchant knows the customer is who they say they are, Ahrens noted. Looking ahead, Veratad is developing a new platform clients can deploy to reduce the risk of fraud online when onboarding customers. And it plans to bring in mobile carrier data and device ID to further strengthen its value position globally.

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