Verifi’s long term strategy.
Hello world,
We are at the beginning of an interesting conversation on how to digitize the connections between businesses and individuals across the different spaces where they intersect. Our actions have consequences, our interactions a data point — How do we make sense of it? As individuals, how can we stake a claim on our identity to guard it against fraud, and as businesses what can give us the comfort that those that we interact with, employ, partner with are who they say they are?
Verifi is our attempt to make better sense of our world, to digitize the mundane, connect the dots and paint the picture of a life through the various transactions that make our humanity real. This is our plan but it is subject to change, life evolves and the winds of change often blow in unpredictable ways but that said even in the eye of a stormy world, understanding where we need to go is key to success.
1. We are going to build the largest privately held and most robust biometric engine through a partnership with Mobbeel and some done in-house that will capture fingerprint and facial recognition data.
2. We are going to allow individuals to establish the basis of their identity tied into these unique biometric endpoints by capturing the data at our verification centers and will continue to look for ways to capture data remotely without compromising data integrity.
3. Via a semi-public API, we will allow third party companies with identity and reporting needs to build on top of or link into our biometric product. It will be free to license, to report but we will charge for information requested on individuals.
We plan to engage companies like Fibre, Lidya, OneFi, RenMoney and other financial institutions to offer up our verification API and in exchange they will continuously report back to us the financial performance on individuals automatically via the API on the services they offer and we would store this data to the biometric marker for future analysis. We expect banks, landlords, insurance companies etc to use this reporting mechanism. This service does not look back, it looks forward from now.
4. We are going to build a suite of products that will serve a utility but will also allow for data collection.
5. Our first product is Pay by Verifi, it is a simple payroll product that allows employers to upload an employee list which triggers an email to the employee to set up a profile. The employer will be able to pay salaries, deduct taxes that are payable to governments and other withholdings such as health insurance and pensions.
Employees will also be empowered to choose which accounts they want their money to be deposited into, if they want to opt in or out of the company insurance and buy their own, if they want to participate in the company pension scheme or work with other providers that we will give them access to.
Pay will allow companies and their employees to gain better control of their financial lives. A lot of the features on Pay will be powered by the reporting API on Verifi, meaning that each action is sent to their biometric record for storage and analysis. Pay is live and new features are being added daily.
6. Assure is another Verifi product that is powered by our biometric engine. With Assure, employers can request that we verify university degrees, professional certificates and all other unique data-points that are identifiable, time stamped and tell us something about the individual. All of this data will be linked to the unique biometric marker for storage and further analysis. Assure is live and new features are being added daily.
7. Inform is our third party data API, and it is truly exciting. It is powered by Data and Machine Learning. It allows us to share information we have on individuals with those that request them and allows us to receive information on financial performance etc from our partners.
And the best part is that over time, it assigns risk scores to each individual helping us make more informed decisions. The more data it is fed, the more accurate it becomes. This is really exciting stuff because it can redefine financial services.
8. Data collection is our immediate mandate but we will monetize by charging a small amount for our payroll product and Assure. We don’t want to charge too much because the closer to free, the larger the amount of data that is collected. Our main source of revenue will be when institutions requests information on individuals for the sake of financial services- we will charge a premium for that.
We expect the company to be bought by either Experian, Equifax or Transunion. Other non-traditional tech companies are also potential acquirers and depending on other factors, we will consider a public listing.
Ebun, Chidozie & Nonso
