Improving e-commerce and online authentication with Safein
Let’s say you went online and discovered some product or service that you’ve wanted. Unfortunately, this was not on a website you’ve used before and buying there meant new registration, verification and sharing of personal data. Chances are, you saw all this as inconvenient and left. In fact, at least 22 per cent of all other potential customers did the same. Whereas, if it was a cryptocurrency exchange or some other company asking you to go through yet another KYC process, 22 per cent would usually be quite close to the actual number of potential users who stayed.
Sounds familiar? It would actually make us very happy, if it didn’t. Unfortunately, modern e-commerce and online experience is still plagued with serious threats, shortcoming and inefficiencies. To name a few, weak cyber security, costly onboarding, repeat registrations, slow KYCs, ignored data protection, forgotten passwords and limited payment options are all still topics of interest. Admittedly, we’ve learned to live with these problems, but they nonetheless cost e-commerce a great deal of traffic, conversion and competition. Moreover, they hurt customers, merchants and online experience in general. In short, there’s no bright spot in this story. Naturally, someone should make one.
In fact, it’s not really impossible once you know where these problems came from. At the infancy of internet, the cyber community had to choose: use universal authentication for users as we do in the real world or fragment the network with numerous separate accounts. Despite its superiority, universal authentication did not prevail. Mainly because introduction of universal account for every user required significant investments and broad consensus of the market — none of which was easy to capture until recently. However, enthusiasm for the solution has not been lost and the demand for it is here, thus we believe that, with the help of crypto market, we can finally advance and make the improvement that’s long overdue.
What we propose is changing the way we interact online by adopting a single sign-on digital wallet created by Safein. This wallet allows our users to create a single verified account on our platform and use it for daily purchases on other websites without having to register, remember password or manually enter personal information on such sites ever again. Without instant access to various products and services (including the ones that you would normally wait days before being approved for), Safein is also envisaged to allow convenient payments in any popular fiat or crypto currency available to the user. Having all this in place should save lots of precious time to our clients and create a truly universal gateway to the network.
We insist that our solution will be able to solve numerous problems in e-commerce. First, instant access is of great value to the market as some registration and ID verification procedures take weeks before the highly displeased user is finally admitted to the site. Second, flawed cyber security is a threat that should be taken seriously. Having numerous accounts and sharing your password or personal documents with various websites is not really a good way do it. Instead, already verified accounts protected by someone well suited for it should be used in order to limit the transfer and exposure of such data. Moreover, personal data protection is key to Safein and the EU GDPR coming into force this May is a legal act that many will fail to comply with. Accordingly, we aim to help the market in this by passing the only “need to know” information to merchants and limiting the intrusive, unnecessary data collection on our users that’s been a norm for so long.
Our research shows that demand for our product is massive. Even basic single sign-on solutions created by Facebook or Google have been used by more than half of all online users at least once to avoid registrations or manual input of data. And these are the platforms that usually hold no verified accounts and frequently ask you to share with the merchant your photos or list of your friends. Imagine how convenient a proper authentication platform would be. Moreover, with the rise of cryptocurrencies e-commerce is also facing a new struggle in payments. Namely, every day more and more users hold at least some of their money in crypto assets and look for ways to utilize them. However, merchants are reluctant to accept them as payments and insist on receiving all their money in fiat. Prime example of this is a move by Steam® to no longer accept Bitcoin payments as of December 2017. On the other hand, we see these payments as an inevitable future. And we are more than happy to provide an automatic currency conversion solution to advance it. Finally, we believe that, as in the real world, your authentication and payments should come from the same wallet. This is not only natural, it’s also more secure, cheaper and convenient. All of these are the key elements of our product.
Finally, our platform is not only convenient. It’s also cost effective and beneficial to both sides of the table. With us, merchants can downsize on their customer support departments, ease the burden of proper cyber security and regulatory compliance, save a fortune on client onboarding and increase the conversion rate at the same time. For users, we give them instant access to products and services, convenient payment solutions, increased trust in e-commerce, broader choice of goods and services, time no longer wasted on verifications and password recoveries, enhanced cyber security and, no less important, real control of their personal data online.
With all this in mind, we feel that we’re building a truly desired solution and feel happy about being a part of this leap in technology. We’re also glad to announce that first results of our progress can already be found on our website and we encourage you to go and try our MVP for yourself. Please also have a look at our White Paper, where we present our ideas in detail, and follow us on https://twitter.com/safeincom for further updates.
