From humble beginnings to mavens in digital customer onboarding and fraud prevention technologies, we have come a long way. While we do not have a grand message to give out, as the best is yet to come, here’s our story so far. I am writing from where we are now taking back to where we started ten years ago, and back again, so stay with me.
Entrepreneurship begins with storytelling. Citizens tell stories to describe problems. Entrepreneurs tell stories to describe solutions. The more interesting the story, the longer it will linger in the collective minds of humankind — friends at frslabs.
Couple of months ago in December the office was busy with the release of our latest product. Aldus Video KYC — A live two-way video verification between the Bank official and the customer. At the beginning of 2019, we began extending our offline video kyc (ID and video captured on mobile or web and uploaded to server) to real time video kyc betting that this will change the way customers are onboarded for a generation to come: removing serious language, geolocation, proximity, costs and technical barriers. We announced the release of our Video KYC product in our year-end newsletter. This was unbeknownst to us that the regulator would accede to this kind of onboarding (V-CIP) just nine days later. The timing couldn’t have been better. If anyone can hold a phone in front of them and answer questions about them, then they should be able to open a KYC compliant bank account. How cool is that. Imagine the possibilities. A billion people can choose to open an account from anywhere in India. Even the smallest Bank in India can now onboard a customer from the remotest of India, without being physically present.
If we knew how many were helpless to open a bank account, buy an insurance policy, get an insurance claim or get a SIM, for want of paper work, we might be motivated to help those who need one — friends at frslabs.
It reminds us when the whole customer onboarding journey began for us in early 2014. We were until then focused on our fraud prevention platform and in particular catering to telecom customers. We provided evidence to one of the largest telecom customers in the world — relied on good old data analysis without the hyper adjectives to prove a point — that much of the fraud detected can be prevented if companies get their onboarding and application checks right. Soon after, in 2014, we started building a voice biometrics platform that Banks and Telecoms could use for authenticating a client at the time of account opening and for service delivery and preventing identity fraud. We were so excited that we went ahead and filed a patent in early 2015 once we built a working prototype.
When looking at problems, incumbents settle for possibilities that has eventually worked elsewhere. Disruptors deeply question the possibilities not taken — friends at frslabs.
The technology was a spectacular failure but much to our amusement we recovered remarkably well. I remember the first client meeting we scheduled for this technology with a Bank in Kerala (South India). We took a really early morning flight from Bangalore. We made it bang on time for the 9:30 meeting. Registration was done and the host (CTO) was informed and the receptionist gave us a warm smile. A positive smile. However, the two of us were sitting there and the clock showed 11:30 at which point I said we have a plane to catch soon. And finally at 12:00 we got the message that CTO was on leave and wouldn’t be able to make it after all. But two of his subordinates were summoned to listen to our demo. And we realized that there was not an inch of interest and perhaps the technology was way ahead of its time. Even the most forward-thinking banks were not ready for radical changes to their onboarding processes. We were politely shown the door. And several times after.
If people’s needs don’t fit the dogma, then the dogma, not the needs, needed to be changed — friends at frslabs.
The reason we focused on voice authentication at the time was that feature phone was still ruling the roost and smart phones had limited capabilities. But smartphone sales were exploding and was expected to top 450 million a year soon. We quickly turned around and used the same machine learning techniques to train our models using as many publicly available face data and launched our face recognition product. We felt there was a gap in OTP based Aadhaar authentication whereby we could compare the face from Aadhaar to the selfie and verify the true owner of Aadhaar beyond doubt. At the time, we figured virtually nobody was doing this. And so, we took it to every possible bank with the strategy “step up authentication” for Aadhaar. Again, we failed to appreciate that Banks cared even less to extend anything beyond what the regulator wanted them to comply with. We signed up a couple of POCs with Banks but it would take another two years for this to really take off.
True to Kay’s and Drucker’s words, the best way to predict the future is to create it — friends at frslabs.
We soon developed other capabilities such as optical character recognition and followed up by video voice verification for anti-spoofing. And a great partnership with Colin Yates led to creating Prism to tackle international revenue share fraud for telecom companies — and this was done for the first time breaking new grounds to detect and prevent IRSF fraud. While all of this didn’t yield much in revenues, the experiences and learnings were unmatched. The byproduct was that it catapulted our products to a more mature and a high-quality state. By this time, we had filed for five patents. Independent verifications by major Banks and FinTechs confirmed we were ahead of the curve. And we were on stage every time we applied for a competition. In 2015 we won the TiE competition, were on the stage for Wharton India, went to Canada though the Canada India Accelerator, and later won USD$30K in price money competing around the world.
We are building products that put people in control. Putting privacy at the core and breaking identity barriers for billions of people — friends at frslabs.
And that brings us to Kyzo released in early 2019 — a groundbreaking innovation — a product to which we are proud to add our name. The idea was to make identity super secure and at the same time sharing with businesses easier. We created Kyzo as a secure digital wallet. Just as citizens store their physical identity cards in their physical wallets, Kyzo allows digital identity documents to be stored securely within Kyzo. What is stored in Kyzo remains in Kyzo encrypted, putting to rest fears of mass hacks, leaks and privacy concerns. When it comes to sharing with businesses, all the user has to do is scan a QR code and the service provider can receive it securely as a digitally signed document. Businesses don’t need any technical integrations to receive the KYC documents. Imagine walking into a Bank/Hotel and scanning a QR code to verify your identity at the teller/lobby. It is rather cool and we have big ambitions to get Kyzo to a billion people in the coming years.
Ten years ago, today, a letter was lying on my lap saying FRSLABS was officially registered. And I was holding my newborn baby in my hands — wondering how they both would grow. And here we are. At Ten.
