Veriff and Legitify: helping a pioneering start-up simplify cross-border digital notarization

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About Legitify

Legitify is a secure online document notarization solution that aims to simplify cross-border transactions in the EU, UK and other markets, making them convenient, secure and compliant. Its remote, notary-as-a-service solution reduces friction, increases efficiency and offers greater convenience for businesses, individuals and notaries when notarizing documents. Legitify’s solutions address a wide range of use cases, including anti-money laundering (AML)/ know your business (KYB) compliance related notarizations, corporate document authentication, power of attorney execution, certification of educational and professional qualifications,

What business problem did Veriff solve for Legitify?

Notarization is a formal legal process that’s traditionally conducted manually, face-to-face, to help ensure the parties involved are who they say they are. While increasing digitization has led to many processes moving online, notarization has proven resistant to the trend due to the legal and often financial importance of the transactions involved. 

This can create significant inconvenience, particularly where the parties to a transaction are based in different locations.

“If you're a business doing cross-border transactions that require notarizations on an ongoing basis, or you have a compliance procedure on behalf of your customers, then it's really a bottleneck in your internal processes,” comments Legitify founder and CEO Aida Lutaj.

The COVID pandemic underlined the need for a means to notarize documents remotely. Legitify’s founders recognized an opportunity and started the company to fill this niche. As a startup, Legitify needed to focus on its core proposition, but verifying the identity of the individuals involved was a critical element of the process. That’s where Veriff came in. 

What made the difference to Legitify when choosing Veriff?

Legitify evaluated a range of potential partners before deciding to go forward with Veriff and a number of factors influenced that decision. Firstly, Veriff already had a global presence and had resolved many of the challenges that Legitify faced in terms of making a solution work across jurisdictions. Veriff also had proven expertise and capabilities covering the different compliance and regulatory regimes in hundreds of countries and territories around the world. This not only avoided the need to work with different verification providers in different markets, but it also meant Legitify could grow its business rapidly. 

“From the get-go, we wanted to do transactions in different jurisdictions,” says Aida. “For us, the ability to have one partner that had that global presence meant we could onboard a lot of users in different markets, and that would also allow us to scale quickly.”

Secondly, the biometric verification offered by Veriff was well-suited to the regulatory regime in Europe, Legitify’s core target market – as opposed to the more qualitative approach common in some jurisdictions. Legitify made the decision to integrate Veriff’s solution into their platform’s workflow while still at beta stage.

What was the impact of implementing Veriff?

Having integrated Veriff’s solution so early in the development of its offering, Legitify was quick to see the benefits, both in terms of security and efficiency.

“The more you operate in sectors that tend to be regulated, whether it's financial services, or banks, or legal services, or another category, they obviously want to ensure that there's trust and security built into your platform,” says Aida. “If you have an internal process where you need to verify identities, obviously, it's important to choose a partner you can trust and that it's secure.”

Partnering with an established global identity verification provider like Veriff helped give Legitify’s potential customers confidence that transactions would be as secure and compliant as they needed to be, whatever the jurisdictions involved. 

The other side of the coin was that as well as being secure, Legitify’s offering needed to create a frictionless experience for verifying the identity of users.

“I think that was fundamental in the early stages of Legitify because our whole value proposition was based on making notarization a smoother process,” Aida explained.

At the same time, Veriff’s global reach and cross-sector expertise helped Legitify expand rapidly from Europe into other territories, and into use cases ranging from know your client and know your business to proof of residence and power of attorney. 

“If you look at digital identity, that's the backbone of a secure transaction. So as more and more transactions move online and as more and more transactions happen cross-border, ensuring that the digital identities used are secure and can be trusted is fundamental,” says Aida.

About Veriff

Veriff is the preferred identity verification partner for the world’s biggest and best digital companies, including pioneers in fintech, crypto, gaming, and the mobility sectors. We provide advanced technology, deep insights, and expertise from our foundation in digital-first Estonia and honed in leading the digital identity revolution. The partner of choice for businesses who need to verify online users rapidly and effortlessly from anywhere in the world, Veriff delivers the widest possible identity document coverage. 

By supporting government-issued IDs from more than 230 issuing countries and territories and with our intelligent decision engine which analyzes thousands of technological and behavioral variables Veriff enables trust from the first hello. With more than 550 people from 60 different nationalities and offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, and Estonia, we are dedicated to helping businesses and individuals build a safer and more secure online world.