1. History

2. Service

3. Accolades

4. References

5. External links

Onfido is a software company that helps businesses verify people's identities using a photo-based identity document, a selfie and artificial intelligence algorithms.^[1] It was founded in July 2012 by three former students at Oxford University: CEO Husayn Kassai, COO Eamon Jubbawy, and CTO Ruhul Amin. Onfido is headquartered in London and has 200 employees in offices across San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Delhi and Singapore.

History

Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy, and Ruhul Amin first met when they were students at Oxford University. Kassai met Jubbawy when they co-ran the university's Oxford Entrepreneurs society. At one point, the three entered discussions of forming a new company after they had identified the inefficient process of getting background checks completed in order to secure jobs in the finance industry.^[2] Each went through a check that took from 2-6 weeks. They spotted that 80-90 percent of a background check was done manually and therefore prone to human error. Background-checking companies also have runners on the ground in many countries to manually go into police stations and courthouses to check records.{{cn|date=January 2019}} Manual checking is also often handled on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis and there are 13 separate jurisdictions in Germany, 116 in France and 3,200 in the U.S.^[2] They decided to build a technological solution to the problem and secured seed funding of £200,000 from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, launching Onfido in August 2012. The three secured initial deals with around 10 small web publishing companies. In January 2013, Onfido secured its first major client, Hassle.com.^[3]

In February 2015, Onfido raised $4.5 million from a Series A funding round to help expand the business.^[4] and in mid-2015, the company opened its office in San Francisco, California, and, several months later, hired former Google director Ed Ungar as its CCO to help with its growth.^[5] By April 2016 it had done almost ten million background checks.^[6]

While initially focused on doing background checks for businesses hiring large numbers of permanent staff and contractors, by September 2016 it had shifted its focus to financial services and e-commerce companies. These companies are required to verify the identities of people with whom they do business as part of "Know Your Customer" (KYC) regulations and to help prevent fraud. Onfido helps them to do this without onerous background checks.^[7] The company also wants to help get people who don't currently have bank accounts into the banking system.^[8] Almost 40% of the world’s adult population is excluded from opening a bank account, most often due to having thin credit files, or being new migrants without the requisite documents needed for in-person verification and legally required Anti-Money Laundering checks.^[9]

In 2017 the company had 1,500 customers including Square, Revolut and Zipcar.^[10]

In April 2019 Onfido raised $50 million in Series A of funding. The round was led by Softbank Investment and Salesforce Ventures, with participation from M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), FinVC, and others.^[11]

Service

Onfido provides identity verification through its online platform. Almost everyone now has a smartphone with a built-in camera{{dubious|date=January 2019}} and Onfido is able to use this to compare and cross-reference a person’s facial biometrics with their identity document, such as driver’s license. The person’s identification can then be checked against global databases for any issues.^[12] It uses manual and automated machine learning technologies, including optical character recognition and face detection, to verify the passport or ID card of an applicant to prevent fraud. Onfido also conducts right to work, PEP and sanctions checks using multiple data sources.

Accolades

In 2015, Onfido received an award at the inaugural TechCities Awards in the Thames Valley category.^[13] In 2016, Onfido made the FinTech50 list of companies that list the best new businesses.^[14] Also in 2016, Kassai, Jubbawy, and Amin appeared on Forbes{{'}} annual 30 Under 30 list of top young leaders across 20 industries for Onfido.^[15]

In November 2018, Kussai was named to the Financial Times' list of the 'Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.'^[16]

References

External links

• {{official|http://www.onfido.com}}

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