The importance of ID verification

Join the discussion with Onfido and EGR Global for our upcoming webinar on July 23 at 2pm BST and learn how to make the most of the opportunities in the sporting calendar.

EGR Intel (EGR): What kind of onboarding trends can we expect to see in the lead up to the new football season in August?

James Baston-Pitt (JBP): Football is itself a high-demand sport to bet on. Like any behaviour during big sporting events, operators have the challenge of dealing with large spikes in demand and the customers having a high expectation of being able to do things quickly and easily. Identity with regards to KYC is very hidden and customers generally don’t really care too much about that. For operators, however, they need to have all the right controls in place to allow them to acquire customers with a strong user experience to ensure they have a high level of conversion and retention.

EGR: Can you explain how Onfido works and how its offering differs to the competition?

JBP: One of the big industry changes has been the Gambling Commission tightening the verification for onboarding by requiring operators to immediately age validate anyone remotely to ensure they are over 18. Some of our competitors have come up with an easy way to verify identifiable information people know in their heads like their address and date of birth. However, we’re finding there is increasingly a need to have data points which show the person is who they say they are at the point of acquisition, rather than, for example, at the point of transaction. We’ve been able to differentiate quite substantially as we have the proprietary technology to verify someone’s legal identity from an issued ID at speed and can then provide a layer of impersonation checking by means of biometric comparison.

EGR: So the end of the 72-hour window for verification checks provides vast opportunities for companies like Onfido?

JBP: Definitely. The online space is heavily targeted at the millennial market – those people who are mobile-savvy and prefer to engage through that device. In doing so, companies are typically targeting an audience which is very hard to verify by the traditional means of verifying against credit source information. This can typically be because they have a weak credit footprint because, for example, they’re renting and still use their parents’ address.

EGR: The industry is becoming more mass-market and targeting a younger audience. Does Onfido’s technology allow companies to tap into this trend?

JBP: If you can’t identify yourself with information you know in your head and have to type into a field, you have arduous steps to go through. We get a lot of praise for what we call SDKs [software development kits]. These are capture tools that sit on the gaming brand’s site and enable people to take live captures, allowing for a really cool cross-device journey. It means people on desktop can send a text message to themselves and take a picture of their ID document without having to upload or download. It’s really slick and designed to make it far more seamless for the customer to verify themselves.

EGR: How does the UK compare to other gambling markets with regards to onboarding?

JBP: In the UK, businesses are typically happy with their base acquisition number at around 80% to 90%, so the UK often gets deprioritised as an acquisition space. What’s important is if you break that down and look at the 18 to 25 age group, that number actually sits at about 65%. When you speak to gambling operators, they don’t usually have that breakdown or look at it at that level, but if they did, they would realise there is a lot of business there which can be won.

James Baston-Pitt is director of UK accounts at Onfido. As one of Onfido’s earliest hires, he has seen the company through huge growth. And as the industry has matured, he has tracked the mass adoption of multi-factor identity verification via identity documents and biometrics. Baston-Pitt is actively engaged in the regulatory and compliance ecosystem. His special area of interest is how to align this system to support the growing online demands of safe, automated customer acquisition.