Bolt: Safe and smooth user onboarding with Veriff

Can you tell us a little bit about what Bolt does?

Bolt is the first European mobility super-app with over 150 million customers in more than 45 countries across the globe. Bolt seeks to accelerate the transition from owned cars to shared mobility, offering a better alternative to every purpose a private car serves, including ride-hailing, shared cars and scooters, and food and grocery delivery. The company was founded in 2013, and today it has 3,000+ employees, 100+ nationalities across the world. Our services leverage Amazon Web Services and their global Cloud platform for maximum speed and reliability.

What wider problem are you looking to solve?

For decades, cities have been built for cars, neglecting pedestrians and light vehicles. This causes many problems – air pollution, noise pollution, accidents, increasingly long distances between locations and square kilometres of parking lots where cars are standing most of the time.

We are fighting to make cities for people, not private cars. To bring our mission to life, we are offering a wide range of mobility services designed to cater for different distances and needs, including ride-hailing, and micromobility rental with scooters and e-bikes; Bolt Food delivering ready-made meals and items from restaurants and stores; Bolt Market - a 15-minute grocery delivery; and Bolt Drive, a short-term car rental service.

What was the business challenge that led you to Veriff?

We started using Veriff primarily to support the expansion of Bolt Drive. With Bolt Drive our customers have access to free-floating shared vehicles without the cost burden of owning and maintaining a car. One of the key components in providing safe and reliable service is proper and smooth user onboarding. Also, we have to make sure that Bolt Drive customers are over 20 years old, have a valid category B driver’s license, and at least 12 months of driving experience. 

For this, we needed to verify that people renting our vehicles hold valid driver's licenses and meet other requirements before they get access to Bolt Drive service. This presents unique challenges as we need a frictionless and fast user experience, while having zero tolerance for fraud and hence need of a really high accuracy. Veriff was best able to meet those needs - helping us verify users in a quick and efficient way, making Bolt Drive safer for our customers and other road users. Also, Veriff has helped Bolt prevent the rate of user fraud and confirm suspicious behavior through real-time identity verification methods.

What was the deciding factor in partnering with Veriff?

Initially we started to verify driver’s licenses for Bolt Drive through another provider that we had already integrated our systems with. However, we were not very happy with their performance in terms of accuracy or user experience. They also did not offer support for some of the specific needs that we have for Bolt Drive. For example, we needed the extraction of driving category data from driver’s licenses, and detection of users who create multiple accounts. Veriff had a solution for both of these challenges.  

We have had some positive past experience working with Veriff with smaller integrations and decided to try it out for Bolt Drive. The improvement was noticeable, and we have kept using their service ever since. The fact that Veriff was quick to implement the extraction of driving category data to support us was also a big factor in our decision to stick with them.

What was the process like implementing Veriff?

Originally, we integrated the Veriff SDK in the main Bolt app. This took a few weeks, the process was smoothly supported by Veriff’s technical and account management teams. 

More recently, we started switching to using Veriff API in some cases. This again was a really smooth process - we didn’t experience any drop in accuracy or turnaround time from the switch, so we are happy customers.

What has been the impact of implementing Veriff’s service?

It’s been 1.5 years since we started using Veriff for Bolt Drive. Veriff’s services are constantly helping us provide a positive customer experience from a safety and fraud detection point of view. We are preventing inexperienced drivers from using the service and blocking fraudulent users from rejoining the service by creating a new account. We also have seen a significant increase in the percentage of users who started the verification process, indicating a smoother user experience.

The prevalence of incidents that we can trace back to issues with verifications has been at a very low level since then. This has had a positive impact on the safety of the service and ultimately helps generate trust with our users and the cities where we operate, helping us get closer to our goal of helping people give up their private cars. 

Collaboration with AWS

For both Bolt and Veriff to provide the best-in-market User Experience and Service, they partner with Amazon Web Services. Their innovative technologies and embraced cloud solutions enable us to build the best solutions for our planet. Sustainability is an important reason for using the cloud and tracking our carbon footprint which AWS enables us to do on a granular level.

By modernizing our infrastructures, AWS helps with scalability, boosts efficiency, and delivers an exceptional customer experience across the diverse mobility services portfolio and identity verification solutions.

About AWS

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 99 Availability Zones within 31 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.