Problem #1: Collecting data is a necessary evil.
In order to verify an individual and maintain the security of any business, it is the unfortunate reality that businesses have always had to collect certain information in order to verify the credentials of an individual who might be working in or representing that business in some way. While today this is something that often happens digitally for remote workers so that they can be employed by companies in the fast-paced, peer to peer economy, the necessary evil of data collection is nothing new.
The difference is that in today's world this data collection now occurs much more rapidly and it happens over the internet.
For example, back in the 1980s and the early 1990s, if you wanted to verify someone's claim to have a certain level of insurance or run a background check, you might actually provide them with a paper form to fill out and keep a file labeled with their first and last name physically on hand.
With the development of modern technology, of course, doing things that way doesn't make much sense. Instead, you might email something over to the applicant, or even use a web form or app to collect this information. These transactions are taking place all over the internet at a much faster rate than ever before.
We love these new mechanisms because they are so much faster and more efficient than the older methods, but there are also increased opportunities for an individual's data to become publicly available. In addition, there's risk associated with bad actors who want to use the internet and technology to exploit security loopholes and hack databases that store thousands of records in a single location.
In other words, businesses have to collect sensitive personal data from users but these same businesses likely don't specialize in the kind of security that is required to protect this sensitive data from unintentional exposures and bad actors.
Plus, there's another problem.
Most businesses don’t want to have to figure out how to verify a user's credentials themselves.
Problem #2: Businesses don't have the necessary resources to build out the verifications they need.
This is because even something as seemingly simple as identity document verification is a complex world to navigate, with hundreds of different security templates in the United States alone and a variety of security features that should be present or absent on each kind of document. A business would need a ton of resources to build out these verifications on their own. Accuracy, speed, and the ability to automate the verification are also major hurdles.
So, the second challenge is that building out the infrastructure required to verify credentials is time-consuming, expensive, and complex.
But...of course, the story doesn't end there.
Evident is the solution.
As mentioned in this article, Evident enables businesses to access only the information they need (and none that they don't) without compromising themselves or the user, and without all the administrative overhead and resource-intensive infrastructure building required to manage verifications.
Evident sees that there is a need in today's world to:
- First, protect consumer data.
- Second, (but equally important), protect businesses from having to store & manage data.
Everything about our platform - from the user interface that you'll use to the way that our fundamental architecture is designed - is intentionally set up to protect both the user and the business from unnecessary data exposure. In this way, we are revolutionizing the way personal data is shared.
The Evident Solution
Evident has a wide variety of verifications. We’ve poured time, energy, and effort into optimizing the submission process for users so that its super-low friction. We've built out processes to standardize verifications so that they can be completed in an automated way when possible and then fall back to a manual mechanism when required. This prevents you from receiving a nonanswer to your verification. For those verifications that can be automated, we’ve poured development resources into computer vision technology and algorithms to ensure that credentialling occurs as fast and accurately as possible. All of that is designed to streamline the onboarding, credentialing, and approval process. And of course, perhaps most importantly, we minimize your exposure to data.
Now, let's talk in more detail about exactly how Evident protects data and what this means for your use of the platform.