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 200 million customers in more than 50 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, the company is headquartered in Tallinn and operates in over 500 cities in more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. 

What is user onboarding?

In the digital age, user onboarding is a crucial process that introduces new users to a product or service, guiding them through its features and functionality to achieve their goals. This initial interaction sets the tone for the user’s entire journey with the product, making it a critical aspect of creating a positive user experience. A well-designed user onboarding process can significantly enhance user engagement, and retention and, ultimately, drive revenue growth.

As users increasingly expect seamless and intuitive experiences from the products they use, the importance of user onboarding has never been greater. A great user onboarding experience can be the difference between converting new users into loyal customers or losing them to competitors. Understanding the basics and importance of user onboarding is essential for creating a successful onboarding process that meets the needs of your users and ensures they remain engaged and satisfied.

Understanding the basics and importance of user onboarding in the digital age.

What broader 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 to 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 in the user journey 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. Capturing customer data during the onboarding process helps create a more engaging experience by setting user expectations and minimizing drop-off rates. Also, we have to make sure that Bolt Drive customers are over 20 years old, have a valid category B driver’s license, and have 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 the 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 a high accuracy. Veriff was best able to meet those needs - helping us verify users quickly and efficiently, 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.

Designing the onboarding process

Designing an effective onboarding process requires a deep understanding of your users’ needs and goals. Bolt, a leading mobility company, partnered with Veriff to craft an onboarding journey that would meet the specific requirements of their users. The goal was to create a seamless and intuitive onboarding flow that guides users through the product’s features and functionality.

Bolt’s onboarding process is designed to be user-friendly and efficient. It begins with introducing the user to the product and its benefits, followed by a series of interactive tutorials that teach the user how to navigate and use the product effectively. Each stage of the onboarding flow is crafted with a specific goal in mind, ensuring that users are gradually introduced to more complex features as they become more comfortable with the product.

Veriff’s support was instrumental in helping Bolt design this onboarding journey. With their expertise in user onboarding and deep knowledge of the mobility industry, Veriff provided valuable insights and solutions that helped Bolt create an effective and efficient onboarding process. This collaboration ensured that Bolt’s users had a smooth and positive onboarding experience from the very beginning.

How Bolt crafted their onboarding journey with Veriff’s support.

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 into our systems. 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 the detection of users who create multiple accounts. Veriff had a solution for both of these challenges.  

We have had some positive past experiences 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?

Initially, we integrated the Veriff SDK in the main Bolt app. Collecting user feedback through in-app surveys and interactive elements during this process was crucial to inform future improvements and better tailor the onboarding journey to user needs. This took a few weeks, and 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.

Creating a seamless onboarding experience

Creating a seamless onboarding experience is essential to ensure that new users have a positive first impression and remain engaged with the product. For Bolt, this means providing a user journey that is smooth, intuitive, and free of friction. With Veriff’s assistance, Bolt has achieved this by focusing on several key elements.

Veriff’s advanced identity verification solutions play a crucial role in this seamless onboarding experience. By ensuring that user verifications are quick and accurate, Veriff helps Bolt maintain high levels of security andtrust, which is essential for user retention. Additionally, the ability to detect and prevent fraudulent activities ensures that only legitimate users can access Bolt’s services, further enhancing the user experience.

What has been the impact of implementing Veriff's service based on user feedback?

It’s been 5 years since we started using Veriff for Bolt Drive. Keeping users engaged throughout the onboarding process is crucial to maintaining their interest and ensuring a smooth experience. 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.