Students Deserve Special Treatment!
The youth demographic is a marketer’s delight. Brands are constantly looking for innovative ways to engage with these young people or GenZ, as they are often dubbed as. Some of the best brands in the World are known to offer special benefits to the student community.
The Global Landscape for Student Discounts
Student discounts have been around for years. From purchasing laptops to a meal at a local restaurant, students have received special treatment across the World. In India too, if you look young enough and have an infectious smile, you can probably figure your way out to getting a student discount on your taxi ride from Churchgate station to a nearby college.
The India Story
We’ve heard of India’s burgeoning middle class and we’ve heard of India’s new age Millennials and GenZ.
Tech-savvy, ambitious and big spenders; There’s no wondering why GenZ seems to be the buzz word every marketer is talking about.
India’s youth is a colossal and influential demographic and presents a unique opportunity to businesses.
- Over 33 million students enrolled in tertiary education
- 35% of shoppers are between 15–24
- Over 40,000 institutions across the country
- GenZ overtaking Millennials as the largest population demographic
- No signs of slowing down!
But how do you verify students digitally in India?
Challenges of Verification
Verifying student identity in India is riddled with challenges.
- Less than 2% of Indian students have access to a .edu email address
- There is no authoritative database available for student verification
- Databases containing names of education institutions are incomplete and not comprehensive
- WiFi IP lookup isn’t feasible as Institutions are scattered, not as large as Universities in the West, and mainly don’t have WiFi access for students
- Document review, while being the most feasible means of verification, also comes with challenges such as support for regional languages and hand-written documents.
A tailor-made solution for India
To perform verification in a cost-effective and scalable manner, we focused our efforts into getting really efficient at reviewing student’s documents.
Using technology, we are able to instantly verify and validate the documents of ~40% of users in near real-time (<10 seconds)
Our auto verification process relies on a confidence score which takes into account parameters such as:
- The User’s name
- The Institute name
- The Validity of the document
Documents go to our in-house team of document review agents when they don’t have a high enough confidence score or:
- They are handwritten
- They are in regional and local languages
- They belong to a new institute (Not yet part of our 20,000+ Institution database)
In case our agents deem the documents as not worthy of verification, they also provide the users with feedback and reasons.
Student Identify in Action
Over 200,000 students have signed up on our service since our launch in December 2018.
We are powering the Student Subscription pack for the music streaming service Gaana across all their platforms (Over 100 Million MAUs)
With the interest in the Student Discounting space blowing up, we’re investing our efforts to take our lead in this space miles ahead by continuing to improve our Autoverification service and delivering a friction-less and commercially viable means of student verification to India’s digital businesses.
To get in touch with us, write to me on Armaan@StudentIdentify.com or visit our website here.
