Sunset on Assure
There was a rare astronomical event this week — a total solar eclipse, with the sun covering the moon, albeit temporarily. We have also decided to halt our Assure product for now and not proceed with school verifications at this moment for the following reasons.
1. Our risk model is based on a number of variables and education is only one of them. To be clear every variable matters and educational attainment has been linked to earning which can be linked to some degree of paying back loans/Financial responsibility etc. That said, education isn’t the strongest indication of risk as is income, in the case of income the relationship may actually be more interesting.
2. A lot of the other data points that inform our risk models are much easier to gather, take gender or age for example. Some not so much, rental, loans etc — not that they are hard but most companies do not have a reporting mechanism today so we are building that out for them and linking them through our API (watch this space)
3. So education may turn out to not be super important in the final analysis. But we were spending about 50% of our engineering resources and 30% of our financial resources on gathering that data. We engaged all the schools and set up an ambassador network as well as plugging into #Interswitch, #Etranzact and #Remita (for more seamless payments)
4. But it’s data we can’t induce, we get education data when employers request education verification so the uncertainty of the cycle was bothersome, we also did not like the fact that some employers wanted to use it as a witch hunt tool by asking us to verify their entire workforce.
5. The biggest factor that triggered this decision however was the schools. To say that they kept poor records is an understatement. We sent made up candidates that were verified as legitimate and legitimate candidates that came back as other people. This was not isolated to one institution although some were worse than others. The turnaround time, the apathy, the aversion to technological innovation made it obvious that this was going to be a battle that was not worth a direct confrontation so we will flank it.
6. We are still collecting education data but have moved it to self reporting and have reduced its weighting. We know the day when we can do true education verification is fast approaching but for now, we will use some other tools to authenticate education but the information will come from the individuals and we will be suspending our relationships with the schools for now.
To the good folks at Interswitch, Etranzact and Remita and to the great folks at the schools and the student ambassadors, y’all rock and thanks for making this so much fun. But this feels like the right time to make this call.
Team Verifi
