Making cities safely affordable
At badi we are invested in facilitating the best quality rooms with the right price, in the right neighbourhood, with the right flatmates. It’s not enough for us to find accessible rooms in an overcrowded city. We want to go the extra mile and take our best shot at presenting you with opportunities that could maximize your wellbeing… the challenge is excitingly onerous.
Banishing loneliness
We know how important our home is to us, it’s our refuge and sanctuary. We understand the power of meaningful relationships and social connections. Studies suggest our happiness and future health are directly influenced by the quality of them. While technology allows us to live as connected as ever, loneliness is being proclaimed as an epidemic. As a result, we’re seeing a greater demand for feeling part of a local community. Our mission is to serve our users who want to fully adopt this new way of life.
We believe this primitive need for physical proximity is part of why we’re seeing a rise in flat sharing. The world is changing and it’s now far more common for people to live for longer in a shared house. In fact, renting is becoming more of a lifestyle choice as people’s priorities shift towards a more flexible way of living. It’s not just about sharing a space — it’s about building a greater sense of community that starts from sharing a life.
Therefore, surrounding yourself with the right flatmates is as important as finding the right room to rent, or more. Naturally, we expect the process of moving to be an indicator of that whole experience, and that experience should be extremely smooth. That’s when we aim to help our users the most!
We have to divide our efforts in between creating a marvellous user experience, and enabling matches that will maximize our users’ happiness. All while making our platform as safe as we possibly can. We want to ensure our users have the best experience when renting a room through badi.
Securing our processes
Booking is how we define this experience: it is the moment in between deciding to move to a new room and actually living there. Once we are living in our new room, we have already met our flatmates and landlord. However, in this interval between booking and actually moving, two things could go wrong (a) our future flatmate doesn’t keep their part of the deal, or (b) there’s actually no flatmate!
If you book through badi, we guarantee your funds, a place to stay, and our amazing crew of Customer Support Angels who will be available if any difficulties should arise. This addresses (a) and (b) above. We purposely only process the booking payout 48hrs after a user has moved into a new room to ensure all parties are happy. Our system is designed to minimise risk, so if you book and make your payment through badi, and you face any challenges, our team will be able to help you find a new place and follow-up with local authorities to safely recover your money.
Unfortunately, if you didn’t book through badi most of the above measures won’t work. In those cases our approach is different…
Protected by our Fraud task force
At badi we believe cross-functional teams are the right answer to most of our challenges. The right mix will depend on the task at hand. To combat fraud we created a team with Engineers, Data Scientists and Customer Support Fraud Experts, our very own Fraud task force. This proved to be the ideal mix when combined with a multi-staged process: Discovery, Automatisation, and Feedback.
We first started with an early discovery stage in which we detected behavioural patterns from fraudsters. Some were simple, e.g. suggesting for quick transfers out of the platform, others were more elaborate schemes from more organised attackers.
Harnessing the expertise from badi’s engineering and data teams, we quickly devised models and built a system to flag suspicious behaviours. More often than not, attackers followed repetitive patterns that proved to work for them on other platforms. For us it was a matter of time to learn such behaviours. Soon we had evolved to automatically detect users that were potential scammers.
However, our work does not stop there. We continue to evolve our fraud detection models as the scammers evolve, too. Our team is constantly updating our systems; and we do our best to make our users aware of the trade-offs when choosing how to book their next room. We are devoted to improving all of our users’ experiences; making cities affordable for everyone… everywhere.
To answer these and other challenges, we want to build an audacious team of general engineers with the grit to put our users first, join us!
