"At Inverid, our mission is to empower businesses with the most advanced identity verification solutions, enabling them to really trust their customers and prevent identity fraud."

The KYC process aims to ensure that an organization is dealing with a legitimate customer and to help identify any potential risks associated with the customer's financial activities. KYC typically involves collecting information about a customer's identity, including their name, address, and date of birth. This information is then verified using various methods, such as reviewing government-issued ID documents or checking public records. However, when it comes to remote identity verification, documents can easily be spoofed when checked visually remotely, breaching the authenticity of documents. Additional data checks can be privacy invading. Conflicting this fact, businesses need to comply and want to reduce fraud in addition to enabling a smooth customer journey at a lower cost.

At this juncture, Inverid is creating a difference, enabling seamless and secure KYC. Inverid is an identity verification solutions provider that focuses on easy identity verification for everyone with a smartphone and a (chipped) biometric identity document. Inverid takes an NFC-first approach to identity verification leveraging the fact that most people have biometric identity documents that have chips that can be read through NFC, the same technology used for contactless payments and in e-gates, for example. Their ReadID technology can verify these with 100% certainty using normal smartphones with a great – real-time – user experience, creating trusted identity verification. "At Inverid, our mission is to empower businesses with the most advanced identity verification solutions, enabling them to trust their customers and prevent identity fraud," says Maarten Wegdam, co-founder and CEO of Inverid.

Most of the physical protections that modern passports have - such as microprints, watermarks and infrared prints - are simply not visible when doing a remote identity document verification based on a photo or video of the document. Conventional visual verification requires people ready to perform all verification 24x7 -costly and hardly user-friendly. This makes it tempting to lower the threshold levels of identity verification using artificial intelligence based verification, eventually allowing more fraud and focusing on compliance only: a great opportunity for fraudsters.

Helping Prevent Identity Fraud
Inverid is a technology company headquartered in the Netherlands, specializing in NFC-first identity verification solutions. With a focus on innovation and security, Inverid provides cutting-edge solutions to help businesses verify the authenticity of identity documents and prevent identity fraud. Its flagship technology, ReadID, revolutionizes the way organizations verify customer identities, providing a seamless and secure experience. ReadID technology is used by Inverid clients as a software SDK, integrated into their app. In the alternative, if customers lack the time or money to develop their software, they may utilize Inverid's ready-to-use (white label) ReadID Ready app. As a SaaS solution, the system checks the document data at data centers, which are in different regions across the world. Clients connect to Inverid servers to get the results. Additionally, Inverid could do face verification on their behalf (holder verification) and provide optical verification as a backup alternative that is less secure. Typically, partners do optical verification under supervision. “We focus on the identity verification part and integrate with the customers’ systems: our SDK can be integrated into their app, and the data is obtained via the REST API on our back-end. The SDK allows them to tailor the user journey to their needs; the API allows them to get the verification results when they need it.”

Inverid’s ReadID technology enables automated identification document verification with limitless scalability, as no manual steps are involved. NFC-based identity verification is still being used in its early stages but already well-accepted in finance, government and trust service providers, as well as in region such at northern Europe and the UK. Inverid anticipates expansion in a variety of industries in Europe and beyond (such as HR and cryptocurrency). Additionally, increasing amounts of self-service procedures with a high enough level of security are needed for border control and travel. Customers like Eurostar have demonstrated that ReadID technology, when used in conjunction with face verification, is quite useful in this regard. “Our identity document verification solution stands out in conversion (95%+ reported by clients), security (no false accepts known), ease of use, scalability (to hundreds of thousands per day, without any manual steps), and ease of implementation (with ReadID Ready),” Inverid co-founder Wil Janssen adds.

Building the Future of KYC
The inception of Inverid dates back to 2013, when an IT innovation advisory group laid its foundation under the name InnoValor, as a spin-off of a Dutch research institute. In one of its research projects, Inverid developed an app to read and verify passports with Android phones. The proof-of-concept app was placed in the Play Store and was downloaded thousands of times in a few weeks. From this, the team learned it was not merely an interesting PoC, be fulfilled a demand in the market. Based on these insights, Inverid’s team decided to productize it and introduced ReadID as the name for the product. Leveraging the innovation contacts in banking, Rabobank and ING were two big customers that needed this solution and new qualities as an organization. Those were important proof points. “Our international breakthrough was when we won the EU Settlement Scheme Tender from UK Home Office (together with Entrust and iProov), the so-called Brexit app. This app was used by more than 6.7 million EU citizens living in the UK to apply for a residence permit, starting in 2019. From thereon we grew strong and focused on our software. The advisory services were split off in 2021 (and still exist). In 2022 Main Capital joined us in an investment round to strengthen growth and enable acquisitions. Up until that moment, our growth was financed internally – we were profitable from day one,” explains Wegdam.

Today, it is the company’s management team's unrelenting passion for innovation that is driving Inverid to success. As a company, Inverid’s team understands the fact that the use of NFC-based identity verification is still in the early stages. The team believes that over time, identities will transfer to mobile devices. The eIDAS2.0 European identification wallets are a good illustration of this. In the next years, ReadID will be the most effective method of adding IDs to wallets, verified data injection as they call it.

Inverid is well-positioned to influence the direction of identity verification, broaden its services across businesses, and establish itself as a leading supplier of mobile verification solutions due to its emphasis on innovation, security, and outstanding user experience. The fight against financial crime and money laundering gains tremendous momentum as Inverid continues to provide organizations with cutting-edge identity verification solutions.