TFH: Trust From Home

The sudden and sizable need for reliable tools to support remote work at an enormous scale has global tech usage surging. Fintech app usage has surged over 70% in Europe alone. Video conferencing leader Zoom has seen traffic quadruple and Cisco WebEx hosted over 70 million meetings last month. Microsoft reports over a 775% increase in monthly users for its Teams communication software - and that’s only in Italy. Slack is supporting, at times, over 12 million concurrent users. Here at Veriff, our daily volumes are quickly multiplying and demand for new use cases to support remote work is climbing. (It is important to note that all companies mentioned are currently donating their resources and technologies to those in need throughout this crisis; here at Veriff we’re donating one million free IDV sessions.)

A silver lining to these dark times is the opportunity to identify and execute new use cases for identity verification (IDV) to support a world in need of stable, reliable digital trust. Of course, the need for more traditional IDV use cases in payments, finance, sharing economies, telehealth, and many other industries only continues to grow in importance and, as always, Veriff teams are working at 110% to support our partners. But we’ve also come across an opportunity to build trust online while the world stays home, as we build and adjust to a new “normal”.

Internal IDV to Support Remote Hiring, Onboarding, Private Meetings and Secure IP

At Veriff, we’re enormously grateful for the opportunity to help businesses implement internal identity verification processes to supplement the myriad of physical verification practices that they can’t implement right now. Though many small-and medium-sized businesses (which we must bolster by paying forward the support they’ve given us over the years) are struggling, a multitude of distributed workforces, software enterprises and Big Tech companies in general continue to scale, operate, and provide critical digital resources.

Scaling means hiring and onboarding, which require identity verification—sometimes traditionally taking place on an employee’s first day, when presenting an ID at reception and receiving internal credentials. This also applies to interns and contractors, the latter often being verified on a weekly or monthly basis. 

In sectors like Finance, Government, IT and Security, there are materials, exchanges, data sets, and communications that should only be accessed, or attended, by specific individuals. In the good old days, losing your internal credentials might have warranted a stroll over to your IT Manager’s desk who had the preexisting knowledge that you are truly you, and a legitimate employee of the company. This interaction is not possible in today’s world. How can your IT manager verify identities over Slack, or email? The same question applies to the hiring manager who makes a copy of your Drivers’ License on your first day. The consequences of an uninvited person attending a shareholder meeting or a bad actor gaining access to internal systems can be disastrous. With their teams working at home, businesses (both for internal and customer/user security, and to comply with regulatory requirements) need to ensure that data like PII and proprietary code can’t be viewed, misused or stolen.

This list of use cases only continues to grow. Veriff has developed and implemented customized solutions to solve these problems in a matter of weeks, and in a variety of ways. Our incredible and experienced team is working harder than ever to help our partners quickly build and maintain trust from a distance. Working from home presents yet another global trust leap that we must traverse together, and technology is that bridge. Smart, customizable, and low-friction systems and processes yield consistent and reliable results. If WFH, or work from home, is the new normal--at least for now--then at Veriff, we will lead the way in TFH: trust from home.