Interview With VeriME Co-Founder & Chief Strategist Sanjeev Kumar

ICO Wingman

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ICO Wingman

10 min readAug 23, 2018

Today we would like to share a new interview with VeriME Co-Founder and Chief Strategist Sanjeev Kumar. Enjoy!

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I am the Co-Founder & Chief Strategist at VeriME. I have over 20 years of experience design, development and marketing of new products in the Internet & Payments Industry. In the last decade, I have been instrumental in rolling out innovative products and solutions across APAC markets with focus on China, ASEAN and Japan. Prior to VeriME, Iserved as Chief Product and Marketing officer at Omise, a Thai Payments start-up. I also have held various senior leadership positions at Visa, CyberSource, Elavon, Cap Gemini and ANZ Banking Group and also skilled at taking businesses from concept stage to multimillion dollar revenue.

I also work with Nguyen Hoa Binh who is also known as Binh. He is VeriME group chairman and co-founder and he has over 16 years of start-up experience in the Internet & Payments industry. He is also the Group CEO and Founder of NextTech Group of companies, a multi-national group of 40+ companies, pioneering in Digitalization Services with an ecosystem of 20+ businesses in Commerce, Logistics, FinTech with annual revenue over 90 million USD.

VeriME presents a unique set of solutions for KYC among others. How did the idea come to be?

Many organizations from different industries across the world are in need of a breakthrough solution which saves their time and cost of KYC processes. The lack of specialised KYC services in the market was our direction towards the idea of VeriME D-KYC and D-SECURE solutions. This idea was conceptualised to develop a seamless KYC process which maximized convenience and minimized cost for both the customer and service providers. VeriME’s Digital-KYC performs KYC processes remotely and completely online without requiring customers to meet, fill out forms and submit documents. D-KYC uses biometric technologies to automatically identify the physical form of customers and match them with authentication documents without the need for a face-to-face meeting.

In addition, the increased need or AML checks is compulsory these days. VeriME also developed holistic solutions to its Partners by offering AML (Anti Money Laundering), PEP (Politically Exposed Person) and Sanction Checks. Many organisations are benefitting from these solutions and VeriME is pleased to be the pioneers in developing these solutions.

What makes it unique amongst some of its competitors?

There are numerous differentiators which makes VeriME unique but ill go over just a few.

To begin with, VeriME is a completely decentralized blockchain based VaaS (Verification-as-a-Service) ecosystem, and not just a KYC (Know Your Customer) service provider. Traditional players in this field are often limited by the scope of work they do, and they are limited by the fact that all their data is stored at a centralized location. Hence, they have to rely on expensive data security systems to ensure the safety of the private data they collect. This valuable data is prone to theft/breach, and often becomes the target of identity theft by hackers.

Like many other players in this industry VeriME is not a VaaS product on White Paper! It has been in the KYC and Authentication space with a product already in the market, downloadable as apps on popular mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. This product is being used by 30,000+ users, piloted by four key Partners in Vietnam, while other BlockChain based players in KYC space are yet to release their software APIs for the community to evaluate.

An additional advantage of using VeriME is the elimination of security threats that arise from Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) and Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attacks. The customer is most vulnerable to such attacks when the browser gets redirected from the shopping cart to the payment gateways and back. Since VeriME partners with major shopping portals and Online Payment Gateways, there is no need for a customer who already has a VeriME account to get redirected to another Third Party Authentication system! This eliminates 3rd Party dependency, eliminates risk of capturing, storing or transferring sensitive data as part of Sales cycle and moreover, reduces costs for Merchants and our Partners.

Since VeriME does not store the data of its users as it remains only on their devices, data security becomes a non-issue when users use VeriME for fulfilling KYC and Payment Authentication requirements.

Your team had a successful conclusion to your ICO. How did it go?

Firstly, we would like to thank all our participants for making VeriME ICO a success.

Here is a recap of our token sale success story to date. The total VME token supply was 398,297,345.34*, rounding off to 400M VME token supply. VeriME sold a total of 108,626,548.73 VME tokens. The total bonus tokens issued was 37,882,623.82. Furthermore, a 3,258,796.46 Bounty was issued and finally, 600,000,000.00 tokens were burned. Additional tokens (1.7M) will be used for Exchange listing purposes.

The team is strong and demonstrated their ability to deliver through a working off chain product with advisors who are highly experienced in fields of FinTech and eCommerce has created good support from the initial stages of ICO to date. We also supported a community of over 44,000 people on Telegram and other social media sites by giving constant support by answering queries and providing valuable information and announcements before, during and after the ICO which gave a strong back up for VeriME.

What is the plan now that the raise has been completed?

VeriME has developed a detailed plan for the business. Few of the important targets to achieve includes:-

· Support 2–3 APAC countries within 6 months of ICO with 100+ key partners

· Support 10 APAC countries with 1000+ partners within 12 months of product launch

· Support 20+ countries across APCEMEA and Americas with 3000+ partners within 24 months of product launch

The funds raised will be used solely for the development of VeriME ecosystem over the next five years (from 2018 to the end of 2022) to reach the targets stated above thus increasing value of VME Token.

We will be releasing our product by late August 2018. Whilst our focus for 2018 would be to penetrate into 2–3 high density APAC countries, we are now proud to announce that our alpha product would be able to support more than 250 countries and territories in its initial release!

What would be your message to the community now that the raise is done?

Firstly, we would like to thank all our participants for making VeriME ICO a success. It’s been a long and eventful journey for us and their support has been immense.

We started our journey in January 2018 of fewer than 500 people, however today we stand strong with more than 44,000 telegram followers, 124,000 Facebook Followers, 9,000 Twitter followers, 1600+ Bounty participants, 5000+ ICO contributors and a million more wishes for success. We are truly grateful for this progress. Without our supportive community this will not have materialised.

Whilst we have been approved by few key Crypto exchanges, we are still discussing internally on other listings. We are also closely working on join ventures and other projects to bring this to bigger success.

We have always taken the best possible approach to safeguard interests of our contributors and VeriME supporters. On the other hand, we would once again thank our community for being very patient us.

We will constantly support the community via our telegram channels and social media sites with news on numerous development on this project.

Tell us more about the platform itself. How does the Blockchain fit into the project’s infrastructure?

VeriME is a decentralized Verification-as-a-Service (VaaS) ecosystem operating on Blockchain and Customer’s mobile application, using the most advanced biometric technologies and machine learning tools to identify and authenticate the Customer during purchase of goods and services. Customers can verify their identity electronically with the Service Providers (Online/Offline, both Blockchain and traditional applications) who are VeriME’s partners in just a few seconds, saving cost for Service Providers and enhancing Customer experience. VeriME operates on a Blockchain-based decentralized model. A customer’s Profile that has been validated & certified is stored right on his/her mobile device, ensuring privacy and eliminating the risk of data leakage.

KYC/AML practices have long been an issue in the ICO world, let alone in everyday businesses. What was some of the motivation behind making this process better?

The traditional KYC process requires that customers and Service Providers to meet face-to-face in order to fill out forms, handover documents which match with the customer. The major issues involved in this process includes inconvenience to the customers, increased operation cost for service providers. Another serious issue is the possible risk of error if the employee is unable to identify and match the authenticity of the documents with the physical person. Moreover, traditional KYC is an unexciting and expensive task. It consumes a considerable amount of time. Its very taxing when customers have to through KYC procedures numerous times with different service providers wasting more time and energy.

With the advent of FinTech and technology-driven services in Southeast Asia, there emerges a very strong demand for digital identity services making way for VeriME solutions.

KYC is legally mandatory for financial service providers. They must adhere seriously to KYC procedures if they want to avoid billions of dollars in fines. Many other non-financial-service industries also need to KYC their customers for legal compliance. So, the KYC market size is tremendous with up to 3 billion customers and it costs tens of billions of dollars annually across the globe.

A common characteristic of blockchain is anonymity, which makes it the preferred mode for financial transactions among criminals. In order to be recognized by the governments for its decentralized nature, transparency and immutability, the Blockchain technology must include mechanisms for legal compliance and KYC requirements. This is a booming futuristic opportunity for Digital-KYC industry in general and VeriME in particular.

What hurdles did your team encounter during the ICO?

Any new industry will face hurdles related to legitimacy and the credibility of their projects. This is especially true in the case of cryptocurrency. Being a startup launching the ICO was not easy. To build the communities trust and confidence was very difficult at that point. People were skeptical and raise their concerns on our social media sites and telegram channels. With our expert team and their confidence in this project the positives vibes were injected on daily basis. VeriME team was well aware of the importance of managing the community. Managing community interactions continuously was draining however it was one of the important parts of success in the cryptocurrency space.

In the initial stages 80% of the time was dedicated to managing community. Answering questions that are harsh and critical in the effort to keep the communication going was strenuous. As time passed the community developed the confidence and gave their support to the project. This allowed the team to stay focussed on putting their time and effort to develop the product and create effective communications with traders and partners. VeriME had put a lot of time in developing the demo page and delivering a whitepaper ahead of the ICO launch. In these ways VeriME was able to prove to the cryptocurrency community that the company was committed and therefore would unquestionably make it through its ICO.

High cost of marketing and publicity was required to legitimize VME during ICO. Meanwhile, it doesn’t help when new ICO such and VeriME does not get easy entrance into top exchanges lacking liquidity of VME tokens. The VME community was very much concern about this matter.

Therefore, VME tokens were only traded in a secondary marketplace with many flaws. High trading latency, difficult account applications poor customer service, not to mention exchange downtime due to high traffic and high trading fees are just a few issues that was faced by traders. This reflected in unhappy community who always suggested the exchange of their preference and etc.

Partner adaptation with a new ICO and project was never easy. With an experienced team couples with hard work, finally it was possible to signup with leading partners namely Maritime bank, Military bank, PundiX and many more. Creating their confidence and credibility in our project took a lot of effort.

Is there a personal quote that you live or work by?

A new startup means there are numerous risks involved. Its never easy at the same time its not impossible. Focus, dedication and believing in my own self was my first step towards anything and everything in life. By not taking any risk, life becomes mundane. I believe that the biggest risk is not taking any risk. I work hard, focus on the direction that I believe in with positive mindset and patience. I believe in the saying patience in a virtue, when the direction and focus is right things fall in place at the right time. If it doesn’t try further.

Thank you for taking the time!

Thank you for having me!